- directly confronts the sexual politics of the male-female, husband-wife relationship
- desperate to write, she narrates in her secret attempt both to engage in work that is meaningful and to retain sanity
- the wallpaper remains mysterious, hauntingly undefined and only vaguely visable; is this the essense of the wife who identifies with the paper
- the text addresses: an entire class of defeated, even destroyed women, to the large body of wasted, or semi-wasted talent
- suffering from breast cancer, she chose not to be a burden to others; she took chloroform and died; it was her final willed choice