In "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, what are two literary devices used to develop the central idea?

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, "The Yellow
Wallpaper," two literary devices she uses to develop the central idea are style and
characterization. Style is defined
as...

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...manner of expression; how a speaker
or writer says what he
says.

In this
story, the narrator tells her story in a series of writings constructed in secret. She
has conversations where she describes what goes on around her and how she feels. At
first the narrator sounds quite grounded. The concerns she has with regard to recovering
her health are brushed aside as unimportant by her husband (the
doctor), and she takes this all in stride, often responding with a
rhetorical:

But what is one to
do?

Her stoic attitude
changes dramatically as she becomes more mentally unsound: since her husband does not
believe that she is ill at all, we can only learn of the narrator's
decline through her writing. When she wants to remove the wallpaper, her husband decides
to leave it up:

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At first he meant to repaper the room, but
afterward 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.

John thinks he has
all the answers—the reader has been able to
follow the narrator's progress all along. She is never aggressive, but begins to lose
touch with the world as it is: the yellow wallpaper is at the heart of her
problem.

At one point, she
describes:

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There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls
like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside
down.

Another clear
indication that the narrator is losing her grasp on reality is found in the
following:

I
never thought of it before, but it is lucky that John kept me here after all; I can
stand it so much easier than a baby, you see.

Of course I
never mention it to them any more—I am too wise—but I keep watch for it all the
same.

As the story
progresses, and the narrator becomes more obsessed by the wallpaper, and her connection
to those around her deteriorates to the point that no one else in the house would know
her anymore. She sees things that are not real.

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The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The
woman behind shakes it!

Sometimes I think there are a great
many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling
shakes it all over.

When his
wife locks the door to her room and throws the key outside into the bushes, John has to
get it to open her door. When he enters, there is his wife, creeping along the
wallpaper. She believes that she is the woman trapped behind the
paper and is allowed to come out at night to creep around. When John sees his wife, he
faints dead away.

It is the style Gilmer adopts that take
the audience through the various stages in mental illness. The second literary device
used is characterization, described
as...

...the
way an author presents characters. In direct presentation, a character is described by
the author, the narrator or the other characters. In indirect presentation, a
character's traits are revealed by action and
speech.

In this story, the
narrator's character traits are revealed by what she does and says: this is
indirect presenation. As shown above in the style the author uses,
we also see the characterization of the narrator. She tries not to be difficult,
appreciates Mary's help with the baby, but loses herself to the woman she comes to
believe is trapped behind the wallpaper. Her actions show us that she suffers from
mental illness.