Another interpretation could label the yellow color of the wallpaper as a type of irony because yellow is ordinarily known for being a very vibrant and radiant color. “It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw - not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things”(Perkins Gilman). The irony is that the reader may expect a happy, bright yellow but the yellow is actually a disgusting mustard yellow.

   Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.

   It is always the same shape, only very numerous.

   And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder—I begin to think—I wish John would take me away from here!”(Perkins Gilman). 

As the story progresses the narrator moves further and further into her imaginative fantasy. Although the true mysteries of the wallpaper strike fear into the narrator, she is also jealous of anyone else solving the wallpaper’s mystery first. She becomes more and more protective of the wallpaper and even begins to talk less to John as to not give away her secrets about the wallpaper. Therefore, the wallpaper is causing her to move towards insanity but also into even more isolation than before.