“The Yellow Wallpaper” uses dramatic irony to highlight Jane’s fragile mental state and helplessness. After a few weeks in isolation, Jane misses the comforts of her old home, and in her second diary entry she laments being forced to live in an unwelcoming environment:

The wall-paper, as I said before, is torn off in spots, and it sticketh closer than a brother—they must have had perseverance as well as hatred. Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there, and this great heavy bed which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the wars.

Jane maintains that the room in which she’s recovering from postpartum depression used to be a nursery. Her diary entries, however, reveal that it likely housed a mentally ill person in the past. Jane’s description of the room creates dramatic irony by allowing the reader to pick up on things she misses. The “scratched and gouged and splintered” floor and “dug out” plaster seem to indicate that whoever stayed here before Jane was kept here against their will. Children, or even several children, probably couldn’t have caused the level of damage she reports. The reader can thus infer that the room previously housed another mentally ill person who tried to claw their way out of the room. This implication adds a sinister air to the story and hints that Jane is being treated more like a prisoner than a patient, even if she doesn’t verbalize this idea.

Jane and her husband, John’s, relationship also creates dramatic irony. Jane holds her husband in high esteem and often praises him, as in this example in the fifth entry:

It is so hard to talk to John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.

Though John does seem to love his wife, Jane’s claim that he’s “so wise” is ironic because the reader can clearly see that John’s treatment plan for Jane—confining her to a room and denying her social interaction and intellectual pursuits—is worsening rather than healing her depression. Because John is a physician, both he and Jane believe that he must know best, even when his prescribed treatment is doing more harm than good. In this sense, the reader has a clearer understanding of Jane’s mental state than either John or Jane herself do.

Finally, when Jane begins to spiral into a mental breakdown, her seventh diary entry offers yet another instance of dramatic irony:

Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was. John is so pleased to see me improve!

Again, John seems to think his treatment is working, but the reader knows that he is mistaken because Jane has, in fact, lost her grip on reality. Jane’s diary gives the reader access to her inner thoughts, which she does not share with anyone else—but Jane also doesn’t seem to recognize the signs of delusion in her own words. Prior to this passage, Jane revealed in her diary that she’s begun to see a mysterious figure—a woman—moving behind the wallpaper in her room. The reader is meant to interpret this as a hallucination, a sign that Jane isn’t, in fact, improving, even if John and she herself believe that she is. Together, these instances of dramatic irony emphasize how the characters fail to understand the true severity of Jane’s mental illness.