She believes the woman behind the wallpaper comes out from behind it during the day and creeps around. This late entry to her diary reveals to us that the narrator has descended completely into madness. ‘It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.’ The narrator ends up abandoning her attempt to describe the strange smell of the paper, simply labelling it a ‘yellow smell’. The narrator becomes obsessed with not only the moving shapes she thinks she can see in the wallpaper, and its foul smell, but also its yellowness – a colour which here symbolises sickliness, unwholesomeness, and perhaps even putrid decay. ‘It is the strangest yellow, that wallpaper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw – not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.’ It is another reminder of the narrator’s unsettled and disordered mind, suggesting as it does something out of sight but sensed on the fringes of consciousness – a movement that we are aware of without being able to see it.
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