The narrator again gives us a hint as to what happened that made her mentally break. She writes, “Nobody would believe what an effort it is to do what little I am able, - to dress and entertain, and order things. 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” (Gillman, 649). The narrator gave birth to a baby boy. Knowing that she was recently pregnant, and assumably have given birth a short time before they rented the house for the summer, explains her initial condition. The narrator is suffering from postpartum depression. Unfortunately, at that stage in medicine postpartum depression was not yet discovered. In an article by Crystal Gantt, she writes: “There were many faulty beliefs and practices in the past that led to such treatments. For example, in 1899 a hospital in Minnesota warned that women were at great risk of going insane. They claimed that, disturbances of the nervous system [were] associated with the bearing of children. This misdiagnosed insanity has been re-assessed. Today, we call this post-partum depression” (3). The narrator was simply going through something that a lot of women experience after child birth. If medicine was more advanced in that day, she would have never gone through that