Best expressed through the narrator’s refusal to rise from her chair and assign a definitive meaning and identification to the mark on the wall, this theme permeates the story. Rising from the chair to observe and assign one denotative and connotative meaning to the mark on the wall is metaphorically correlated to the process of using language and empiricism to assign definitive meaning to objects in the world. The narrator’s refusal to execute these actions—and her alternative creation of myriad meanings, images, and possibilities through freely-associating thoughts, feelings, and ideas with the mark on the wall—forwards the notion that the conventions of language and meaning-making which domineeringly proliferate in the world around her are ultimately insufficient and undesirable.

The narrator sees the mandate to use the linguistic, academic, and gender conventions of her society as not only oppressive norms, but as fraudulent ideological tools which purport to name and formalize truth and knowledge while actually masking and limiting all that could be known and knowable. Simultaneously, however, these conventions are inescapable; by virtue of her even using the English language and making use of the references that she does (including Whitaker’s Almanack, Shakespeare, classical and mythology), she signals the fact that she is inexorably ensconced within the dominant conventions of her society.