Bars can symbolize or represent things in many ways, and the reader sees many examples while reading the short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”  In the story, one could say, the bars that are on the woman’s windows symbolize what she was going through with her husband on a physical and mental level.  This close reading will portray what, exactly, those bars stand for and what they hint towards the reader.

The unnamed main character, is a married woman and new mother. Her husband John decides to put them upstairs in a “nursery” but in reality, he is trying to keep his wife out of his hair and not have to deal with her issues.  At this point is where the reader, is first introduced to the bars.  When the woman says, “He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on,” it tells one that this is the first she is seeing of the bars as well (302).  When she first sees the bars upstairs, on the windows, this is symbolizing that she is being trapped by her husband and he is not letting her be herself.  He is physically trapping her in the room.  These bars are also viewed by the reader as bars that are keeping her away from her newborn baby, and she is trapped and stuck without her baby.  A more common, physical interpretation of the bars would be a jail cell.  Her husband puts his wife in her “cell” until she has spent enough time to be released.  

The bars on the windows, are not just physical barriers, but also mental barriers.   Mental challenges happen from the beginning of the reading, until the very end, and the bars are a representation of that struggle and mental challenge she is having.  The bars are soon too much for her and she soon begins to hallucinate, saying, “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. “(309) and this shows how her mind is trapped into thinking that there is really someone behind the bars.  The bars symbolize that her mind has gone into a mental state of craziness and she cannot get out of it.  The woman is crazy and the bars symbolize the barrier separating her mind from a sane point of view and an insane point of view.  

Another option is that the woman behind the bars is in fact the main character of the story, herself, and she cannot escape from the trap.  The woman behind the bars and in the wallpaper, is the main character feasting on her prey, the weak, sick woman.  The woman in the wall draws John’s wife closer and closer to her each day and eventually traps her inside of the wall and holds her captive behind the prison like bars, in a world of no return and a world of insanity.

At the end of this story, she really lets the reader know that she has officially gone crazy.  Concluding the story John opens the door to the room upstairs and his wife says “I’ve got out at last…in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, you can’t put me back!” meaning she has finally reached her breaking point and is accepting her insanity (311).  One could interpret the bars in this sense, with the saying, “walls are meant to be broken.”  The woman was trapped mentally and physically behind the metaphorical bars on her windows, but she breaks the bars and accepts where she is at mentally.  

The symbolism of the bars could be viewed in a simpler minded way.  One could say that the bars are simply, bars on her window.  The bars, her husband has on the window, are simply keeping her in her room safely so she does not do anything that could harm her.  

Potentially, the reader could view the bars as a symbol of the separation between the woman and her husband.  Reading into the text, one can see that the marriage of the two characters was poor, both emotionally and physically.  There is no intimacy between the couple.  John locks her in a room upstairs away from him and does not want to see her.  The reader notices this when the woman states, “John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious.” (301).  He is a doctor and has a job, but he would not be gone all day long.  So the bars could be seen as the split or parting in the couple’s marriage.

A final assumption of what, exactly, the bars symbolize could be that they are a portrayal of the woman’s future and what is next in life.  In the text she says, “I can see her out of every one of my windows…I see her in the long shaded lane…,” and the woman she sees on the lane is herself in the coming future.  The windows are barred and would have a blurred effect on one’s vision as they looked out.  One could compare the affected vision out of the window to the thoughts of what the woman saw her future looking like.  She sees the woman on the road as her “free” self but the vision is hard to see.

Early in the story, the bars symbolize nothing but confinement and struggle to feel important or wanted, but really the author sets the reader up to see those seemingly unbreakable bars (metaphorically), snap like twigs as she escapes the struggle and accepts insanity.  The bars in this story can be seen as many different symbols, and taking in many different contexts, but ultimately these bars seemed to imprison the mind and body of the woman into a cell like trap of mental and physical struggle.