She is also forbidden to indulge in her favorite pastime, writing, as her husband, says "that with imaginative power and habit of story-making, nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendencies" (79). However, the heroine defies her husband and his sister Jennie, who is serving as a housekeeper/jailer, and writes whenever she's sure she's not being observed. Furthermore, what neither her husband nor her sister-in-law understand is that by trying to force the narrator to rest, not to think, not to imagine, they simply allow her to turn her attention to the wallpaper in the room, which quickly engrosses her. She begins to see patterns that vary with the light. She becomes convinced that, "There are things in the paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will" (82). Finally, the narrator sees, within the patterns and shapes, her own fate:.
"By moonlight-the moon shines in all night when there is a moon-I wouldn't know it was the same paper. At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be" (82).
The "woman behind the bars" is, of course, the narrator, and by the end of the story, she is convinced that the wallpaper is alive with trapped women, and she pulls most of it off in order to "free" them-and free herself. She begins to creep along on the floor, "and my shoulder just fits in that smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose my way" (89). When her husband finally finds the key (for she has locked herself in and thrown the key out the window), she gleefully announces, "I've got out at lastAnd I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" (89). She has created her own world in this room, and she no longer wants to leave it-ever again.