unable to escape her own pain, but confused in her internalization of the lack of value John assigns to her, all contributing to her eventual spiral into madness. 

She tells us how she writes when John isn't around and creeps during the day since she will be caught if she did it during the night. 

I think the initial condition our protagonist was experiencing, was post-partum depression due to the birth of her child, but I think the condition is worsened by the lack of given independence and isolation. With further research, I found an article that pointed strongly to the protagonist suffering from postpartum. At the start of the novella, the protagonist is described as having an active imagination, as she says she used to find faces in plain furniture and wished the house was haunted. During the research process, I found evidence that suggests her madness and obsession with the wallpaper may be her active imagination reacting to the ban on her writing. Being a woman in the 19th century was difficult and they were not given much independence or trust, which is may be why John did not believe that she was sicker than he saw, and prescribed her with bed rest which was cruel in cases like hers and caused her to withdraw into her own head and become obsessed with freeing the woman in the wallpaper. I think gender stereotypes have considerably lessened since the time of this book, but some distrusts may still be there, as they were so tightly woven into past society.