The main character in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a young, feeble woman, who is loved, yet repressed, by her husband, John. In response to John's unchallengeable request that she rest in seclusion in order for her to recuperate from an undiagnosed illness, she begins to illustrate signs of insanity. Being left alone in a large, airy bedroom, occupying most of the top floor of an old colonial mansion, leaves her with little to do but contemplate the lurid, yet mesmerizing patterns of the room's yellow-colored wallpaper. This infatuation ultimately causes the heroin, who is also the narrator, to exhibit the symptoms of hallucinations, paranoia, and delusions of grandeur.
             It is the narrator's hallucinations that begin the downward spiral towards her insanity. After two weeks of near isolation, with the wallpaper as her only companion, she begins to believe that she sees more than the unstructured, uncertain curves of the pattern. She believes she can distinguish not something, but someone, in the paper. This becomes very clear when she tells us, "But in the places where is isn't faded and where the sun is just so-I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure" (670). As the illusions begin to multiply she mentions that, "There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will" (672). Eventually her psychosis grows to the point where hallucinations develop in places other than the wallpaper. She begins to see her figure as a woman, wandering outside the bedroom, on the grounds of the estate. She tells us that:
             I think that woman gets out in the daytime! I'll tell you why-privately-I've seen her! I can see her out of every one of my windows! It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight. I see her in that long shaded lane, creeping up and down. I see her in those da...