Here, I want to focus on the structure of the narrator’s room itself. As stated in the critical introduction, there is a strong sense of duality in the symbolism found in the nursery which the narrator resides in due to John’s oppression and mistreatment. The room is styled as a nursery which their newborn was supposed to spend the majority of it’s time in however, due to the narrator’s “condition”, she is essentially imprisoned in the nursery. This seems fitting because John tends to view his wife as a child and continuously infantilizes her. For example, the narrator describes this interaction where John exacerbates her nervous nature by not fixing the nursery up for her and refusing her to let her do it herself, “At first he meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies.” on page four. Then, instead of making the room more homelike for her, he has the bed dead-nailed to the floor, bars the windows, and locks the door so she can’t move from room to room. Here, the dead-nailed bed symbolizes her tragic and inescapable position and lack of free will.
