While the female narration, and the feminist viewpoint on The Yellow Wallpaper gathers the most attention, what is the reader to make of the narrator’s husband, John? John is a renown physician who recognizes his wife’s compromised state, but does not seem to realize just how severe her condition is, nor have an adequate way of treating it. In fact, he refuses to recognize a condition at all, and instead insists that country air will restore her senses and that isolation from others will give her room to breathe and think. The textual evidence from The Yellow Wallpaper suggests that John is a caring husband and that he does have positive intentions for his wife; however, he is bound by traditional gender roles, and refuses to step down from his position of dominance. From the beginning of the novel, it can be seen that John has good intentions for his wife, and truly wishes for her expedite recovery from the “temporary nervous depression”. This can easily be confirmed when reading “He said we came here solely on my account, that I was to have perfect rest and all the air I could get” (Gilman 316). However, being a physician, he refuses to believe in illnesses of the mind, and therefore cannot see the illness for what it is. Also, being a husband in the society of the time, his sense of superiority over women prevents him from accepting the arguments that his wife makes against the notion of physical illness. John continuously acts on the best interests’ of his wife, and continuously contributes to the deterioration of her mind. By preventing her from writing or doing anything strenuous, he is confining her imagination, forcing her to release it in another way. She does so by overanalyzing the yellow wallpaper, and reaches the point where she begins the hallucinate and lose her sense of identity. She imagines a woman in the wallpaper and actively analyzes the woman’s actions and thought process. The woman is trapped in