Narrated in the first person, the story is a collection of journal entries written by a woman who is isolated in her room to help her “recuperate” from depression and hysteria.
The narrator devotes many journal entries to describing the sickly yellow wallpaper in the room. She describes how the longer one stays in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate, especially in the moonlight. With no stimulus other than the wallpaper, the pattern and designs become increasingly intriguing to the woman. She soon begins to see a figure in the design and eventually comes to believe that a woman is creeping on all fours behind the pattern. Believing she must free the woman in the wallpaper, the woman begins to strip the remaining paper off the wall.