John hired a nanny, Mary, to take care of him. This even makes her more nervous. The narrator tells us, "It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a dear baby! And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous". In this short story, the narrator was forced to stay without her baby. In the introduction Thomas L. Erskine and Connie L. Richards tell us, Gilman was "very much like her father in important ways, for she "abandoned" her daughter to her husband and like him, preferred to deal with her emotions at a distance - in letters, books, or in her fiction". From this we see that Gilman actually had a choice on whether to be without her child. In the story, the narrator was told not to have her child around because of stress. When the narrator tells about the room, she says, "I don't like our room a bit. I wanted something downstairs that opened to the piazza and had roses all over the window, such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! But John would not hear of it". The room has barred windows and "rings and things in the walls". The narrator hates the ugly yellow wallpaper, but when she wanted John to change it, he told her "that I was letting it get the better of me, and nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies". Every time the narrator asked John for a different room, he threatens her with a room in the basement. Personally, I believe that John is doing everything wrong to help the narrator. Treating her like a child did not help her get well, it was her own strength at the end of the story that made her well again. John told the narrator not to write, see her child, and which room to live in. In Chekhov's, "The Darling", Olenka's opinions changed with and as often as her husbands. When she was married to Kukin, the manager of a theatre, all of her thoughts were of the theatre. Whatever "Kukin said about the theatre and the actors she repeated.
