The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a paradox: she's losing touch with the outside world. This split between her inner and outer selves is crucial to understanding the nature of her suffering. She is facing problems with relationships, objects, and situations that seem innocent and natural but that are actually quite strange.
Jane is an imaginative; her memory is extensive. She had nightmares as a child; she loves that their house is supposedly haunted. She often conforms, but as the novel progresses she frees herself from the things that oppress her by concentration on the wallpaper. Her fascination takes her further from relaity by the day, and she begins to keep a diary. This recording of feelings allows her to keep her true thoughts private from then on, and she slips further and further away.
She puzzles over effects in the world that she herself has caused. Things like the yellow stains on her clothing, or the way the long “smootch” on the wallpaper are connected. She rebels against the realization that the predicament of the woman in the wallpaper symbolizes her own predicament.She even disapproves of the woman until she realizes that she is the woman.
When Jane finally identifies herself with the woman trapped in the wallpaper, she sees that she isn't the only one who's been forced to creep and hide behind the domestic “patterns” of her lives, that the woman behind the wallpaper isn't the one in need of rescue; she is.
