confined her to an attic bedroom in a big house on an estate. She tells him she would like more activity, especially intellectual activity, but he is not willing to listen to her needs. He thinks intellectual activity is part of her problem, and she knows that even the journaling she is doing to tell her story is disapproved by him. She is kept away from her baby, and even when she begs John to let her visit other rooms of the house, he refuses to listen.

John infantilizes her as if she is a spoiled child he needs to control. This contributes to her problems. The more she is thwarted, the more the rage she experiences. She is not allowed to express it, as a "good" woman, and it all turns inward. She is not being heard or taken seriously and not having her real needs met. This causes her to decompose and lose all sense of who she is. Sensory deprivation from being isolated in one barred and windowed room leads her to have hallucinatory experiences about the yellow wallpaper. The wallpaper becomes a symbol of her entrapment in a pattern of life that she did not choose.

The story implicitly argues that women need healthy activity (intellectual and physical) to be mentally healthy. Women do not need confinement and forced rest.

The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is limited in her restriction from mental activity, confinement in her room and in not being listened to with regard to her own mental decline.

As a woman suffering from post natal depression, the writer is prescribed a ‘rest-cure’ which was a legitimate way of treating female patients who exhibited signs of mental distress. Unfortunately, as an intelligent and creative woman, the narrator is at first stifled by the limitations of not being allowed to read, write or talk to anyone. She then develops an inner world of her own, where she seeks to rescue the woman she believes is trapped by the hideous wallpaper.

I didn't realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman.

The room in which she resides is an old nursery, which has barred windows. She sees only her husband, who treats her like a child, and her sister-in-law, Jennie. The narrator is not fond of the house from the beginning-

 I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity - but that would be asking too much of fate!

Still I will proudly declare that there is something queer about it.

She is particularly disturbed by the wallpaper, but her husband will not allow the house to be decorated. Her description of the interior show how oppressive her room is:

He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on.

Her husband refuses to see that her mental condition is deteriorating, despite his medical training.

If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression - a slight hysterical tendency - what is one to do?

Having tried to tell him of her strange thoughts, she resolves to hide her declining mental health as she becomes more suspicious of the wallpaper, and of her husband-

The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John.

He seems very queer sometimes.

The narrator is initially suffering from postpartum depression, which typically includes mood swings, increased anxiety, and difficulty sleeping after a woman gives birth. However, the narrator's husband, John, subscribes to Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell's rest cure, which was designed to minimize distressing stimulation and promote physical health among women suffering from postpartum depression. The rest cure involved a solitary rest period lasting between six and eight weeks, where females were forbidden from socializing, reading, writing, and exercising.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman subscribed to Mitchell's rest cure, which exacerbated her condition to the point of a nervous breakdown. Gilman's experience motivated her to write the short story, and the narrator suffers similar symptoms as a result of the rest cure.

After John forces his wife to remain isolated in an upstairs room and prevents her from socializing, exercising, and writing, her depression worsens and she begins to suffer from psychosis. The narrator quickly loses touch with reality and begins to experience visual hallucinations. She begins seeing a wretched, oppressed woman crawling around inside the yellow wallpaper of her room. The narrator's visual hallucinations are a reflection of her oppressed, unhealthy marriage.

By the end of the story, the narrator has completely lost her mind and is virtually unrecognizable to her husband, who faints as soon as he sees her. What began as typical postpartum depression transformed into a severe case of psychosis as a result of the rest cure.

The narrator of the story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a young, middle-class wife and new mother who has been recommended S. Weird Mitchell's "rest cure" as a result of what seems to be a form of post-partum depression.

Keep in mind that we have to be very careful when we ask the question "what brought the illness". The answer is more complex than that. When the woman enters the home, she is asked to rest to cure her depression. However, Dr. Mitchell (who is addressed in the story by his real name), suggests in his treatment that she cannot exercise anything, not even her imagination. THIS latter fact is what triggers her ultimate meltdown, which would have never taken place if she had not been prescribed that anachronistic cure.

As soon as the narrator (whose name may be Jane) is told that she cannot write, draw, or do anything else but rest, she rebelliously starts a secret journal. This is what starts the story. In the journal, she begins to spiral down into an obsession with the objects around her. She is angry at her husband and resentful at her doctor, and at her sister, Jeannie. As a result, she begins to compare all around her with her own inner struggles. The most particular of such struggles is the subservient nature of her relationship with her husband who, as we can see, decides everything for her. Hence, when she begins to see "a" woman trying to crawl out of the patterns of the yellow wallpaper, it is she, seeing herself desperately trying to crawl out the pattern that has become her life. This is why, when she "helps" the woman to rip out of the yellow wallpaper, the narrator says the words

“I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane.”

Therefore that is the true tragedy of the story: that this woman has to literally lose her mind in order to get a hold of herself.