The emergence of the mysterious figure in the wallpaper represents the final stage of Jane’s mental illness, as she begins to obsess over the wallpaper and seemingly hallucinates that there’s a figure trapped behind its pattern. She uses both visual imagery and a simile to describe what she sees:
There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will. 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.
The mysterious form in the wallpaper starts with blurry shapes that “get clearer every day,” eventually morphing into a single woman trying to escape. The imagery at this point in the story establishes that Jane has deteriorated severely—perhaps past the possibility of recovery. Although faint, there has been some hope throughout the story that Jane could heal and return to normalcy. However, the introduction of the shadowy figure ends any chances of that, because it is an indication of Jane losing her grip on reality.
Moreover, the simile in this passage—in which Jane compares the shape behind the wallpaper to a woman—allows the author, Gilman, to insert social commentary. Jane depicts the wallpaper as a prison holding a female figure whose agency and ability to communicate have been taken away. The image of the woman “stooping down and creeping about” is meant to parallel Jane herself, as she’s essentially held captive in the room and forced to figuratively tiptoe around her husband, John, minimizing her own concerns in order to placate him. In this sense, the simile in this passage makes it clear that Jane’s hallucination of the woman in the wallpaper is an externalization of her own true feelings about her situation. The wallpaper represents Victorian social norms as a pattern that restricts, isolates, and undermines women, while the mysterious figure beneath embodies all women struggling to escape it.
