I had previously read the Yellow Wallpaper, but I remember not understanding the events that were taking place. Taking a second look at this short story, and after our lessons on both storytelling and history, this story makes more sense than it did previously. It was written in the late 1800s, which was a time in which women had little to no autonomy in their homes, and were treated like property by their husbands. This context is relevant to the story, because the narrator struggling with mental illness in a time in which women had very few rights and conversations about mental illness were taboo. Although I was not certain of what the symbolism was for the woman in the wallpaper, I interpreted it as the narrator’s representation of herself, trapped in both her room and her mind, unable to escape. She becomes increasingly disturbed throughout the story because she is helpless without adequate treatment for her mental illness and a husband/doctor who thinks she is making this up. Today, the conversation about mental illness has shifted so that it has become more mainstream and has been legitimized.The narrator is faced with the struggle of being not believed by her doctor, who also happens to be her husband. There are multiple levels to this, because she is both not believed by her husband because of the fact that she is a woman and women were of much lower social status than men, so their feelings were not legitimized. I did some research to gain more context, and found that the Yellow Wallpaper was relevant in helping people gain a better understanding of postpartum depression, what the woman in the story appears to be suffering from, which is a very common phenomenon today but was not discussed or understood well in the 1800s.