In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the author is scatter-minded, it keeps the reader guessing what she will say next. The narrator’s issues in “The Yellow Wallpaper” correlates with the treatment with women’s issues back in the 1900th century. (Treichler) The author tells you about a woman who has a mental issue and her husband that is her physician. By looking at the difficulty that the narrator has focusing on one topic, we can see that the narrator is not necessarily insane at the beginning of the story but as time progresses the environment seems to make her more insane. This development of the narrator’s voice from scatter-minded to unhinged illustrates how the husband forcing her into the nursery actually drives her insane. 

In the text, Charlotte Gilman goes from one topic to another giving her audience a wide variety of different paragraphs that explain what she is going through. Although there is a wide variety, she goes off to different topics. “You see he does not believe I am sick!” (Gilman 299) to “Well, the fourth of July is over!” (Gilman 303) She keeps jumping from negative situations to positive situations that help keep her going and in a good state of mind. “It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so.” (Gilman 305) We can see by the narrator being so sure about her husband loving her, she has not made a connection between her treatment and her growingly destabilized mental health. She feels secure around him and her illness that she knows for sure she is safe with him. It keeps her going by the fact he is her support system because without that, she would go madly insane. “Half the time now I am awfully lazy, and lie down ever so much.” (Gilman 305) By this quote, she is using being lazy and lying down as a result of negative in her life. Not necessarily does she use it as an excuse but to break herself away from her developing illness. She uses many distractions to make herself feel better while isolated in the nursey. While distracting herself from her problem, she broadly relies on her husband to help take care of her. She goes on to talk about how her husband is taking care of her one minute and then the next her husband wants to put her in a nursery. 

In 1891, Charlotte Gilman published an article called “Why I wrote the Yellow Wallpaper”. In this article she says, “Now the story of the story is this: For many years I suffered from a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia – and beyond.” (Gilman) In the article “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper,” Gilman tells about the narrator that shares a lot of the similarities with her since Gilman was prescribed “rest cure’, which was being put in bed and staying away from the world. Gilman was being isolated like the narrator to keep her from work, “the normal life of everyone human being” (Why I Wrote). As Gilman states at the end of her article she intends to not make people seem like they are crazy. “It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked” (Why I Wrote). By this Gilman is stating that she was not trying to make people crazy by reading “The Yellow Wallpaper” but to show you the reality of this type of mental health treatment at the time to show you what woman in that time period had to go through with this diagnosis. 

The narrator feels that solitary confinement is not the best thing for her and she would rather be able to socialize with other people. “I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus—but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always it always makes me feel bad.” (Gilman 300) It is her husband that forces her to not be in society, not very sure if it is because he is her doctor or just in general a male figure. She believes what he says is right and she should obey him. “He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get. ‘Your exercise depends on your strength, my dear,’ said he, ‘and your food somewhat on your appetite; but your air you can absorb all the time.’ So we took the nursery at the top of the house.” (Gilman 301) You can see that the narrator goes by what her husband wants. Even with her questionable mental health, the narrator can suddenly pick out the wallpaper and instantly cannot stand it. She broadly states, “No wonder the children hated! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.” (Gilman 301) This text reveals how the narrator is aware that the wallpaper can affect her psychology. There is a connection between her sanity and her surroundings. “The wallpaper, as I said before, is torn off I spots, and it sticketh closer than a brother—they must have had perseverance as well as hatred.” (Gilman 303) You can tell that the surroundings very much agitate the narrator and that she does not consistently focus on any one thing because her mind is going to two different things at once, “Then the floor is scratched and gouged and splintered, the plaster itself is dug out here and there, and this great heavy bed which is all we found in the room, looks as if it had been through the wars.” (Gilman 303) As time seems to go on, the narrator is getting fonder of the room just not the wallpaper. “So I walk a little in the garden or down that lovely lane, sit on the porch under the roses, and lie down up here a good deal. I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper.” (Gilman 304) She is saying the wallpaper still very much annoys her but as time goes on, she is getting use to the room in a way that does not seem to be bad but for instance in a good way. The narrator is starting to convince herself that the room is not as bad as it seemed in the beginning. Although the narrator is kind of just dealing with what is going it is actually making her go more insane. “Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.” (Gilman) The narrator seems to be more confined to the room and more used to being in this room here however long she has to be in there. “John is so pleased to see me improve! He laughed a little the other day, and said I seemed to be flourishing in spite of my wallpaper.” (Gilman) Her husband seems to be happier now that she seems to be getting better. The narrator’s apparent improvement makes her husband feel like he is right with her treatment. “I turned it off with a laugh. I had no intentions of telling him it was because of the wallpaper—he would make fun of me. He might even want to take me away.” (Gilman) She is starting to like the nursey but deep down she is starting to fall into madness which shows how the treatment of isolation is doing more harm than good.  

By the ending of this story she has gone completely crazy. The narrator kind of sees her own phycology in a weird way. She starts to see this figure in the wallpaper and is thinking that this figure has taken over her life but not really taken over her life. Is this figure real? Can this wallpaper be haunted and to the point making the narrator go all the way insane? The narrator uses these names such as “Jennie” and “Jane” to persuade herself to think this figure is real. “I’ve got at least,” said I, “inspite of you and Jane.” (Gilman 312) She has been in these surroundings for so long that it is literally talking about her insanity because this figure is actually coming off of the wall. She has gotten so used to this environment around her, that it makes her believe there is something actually there. 

In the article, “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” Paula A. Treichler explains that in society at the time that Gilman was writing “The Yellow Wallpaper,” “the diagnosis of hysteria or depression, conventional ‘women’s diseases’ of the nineteenth century” were often used to isolate women (Treichler). Gilman seems to think that there is a connection between isolation and hysteria. When her husband forces the narrator to stay isolated and away from the world, which he thinks would physically be better for her, he is actually making her more insane. The narrator is supposed to maintain “self-control” by keeping to herself, but as we can see from the narrator’s progression from calmness to insanity, “The Yellow Wallpaper” suggests that isolation actually causes hysteria rather than cure it.  
