Reading response: How is irony used in this story? How is the wallpaper used as a symbol for the life of the narrator?

To write this one-page analysis, you should first choose a question from the suggested topics that you find most interesting. I will discuss how you might formulate a thesis and discuss each of the topics listed.
Irony can defined in several ways. For this short story, it would probably be wise to focus on situational irony, which is defined as an event that is the opposite of what one might expect to happen in a given situation. The primary application of situational irony here is that the "rest cure" the narrator’s husband prescribes to her actually ends up making the narrator’s mental health condition worsen over time. The captivity of living in the attic bedroom of the country house leaves the narrator at the mercy of her obsessive thoughts. When she tries to tell her husband that she feels as though she is getting worse, he dismisses her concerns based on his merit as a doctor and his position as her husband. This also is somewhat ironic, since a doctor is expected to know what is the best course of treatment for their patients.
To write an essay on this topic, you would need to examine the specific directives the narrator’s husband gives her and look at how following each of them directly contributes to her decline into insanity.
To determine how the wallpaper symbolizes the narrator’s life, you need to refer to the descriptions of the paper itself. First, you have the sickening yellowish hue, which the narrator says makes her feel suffocated. The disgust that the color inspires is representative of the illness the narrator is currently experiencing. The second feature of the wallpaper is its labyrinthine pattern, which resembles an endless number of eyes looking at the narrator as she tries to study its peculiar organization. This could represent how the narrator’s own life is confusing and difficult to figure out, while the eyes could represent all the people who are constantly watching her, including her husband. Finally, when she discovers the hallucination of the woman trapped behind the wallpaper crawling around, one could interpret this as how the narrator feels stifled in her roles as a wife and mother, forbidden from pursuing her vocation as a writer. In these ways, you could certainly explain how the wallpaper represents the narrator’s overwhelming claustrophobia at being stuck in a life that is monotonous and unfulfilling.