In "The Yellow Wall-Paper", Gilman makes use of a first person point-of-view to emphasize the speaker’s increasing insanity, making it more personal to the reader than another point of view could have. As the story progresses, the we watch as the nameless speaker focuses more and more on the wall-paper to the exclusion of everything else. She becomes increasingly distrustful of those around her, and is concerned if they begin to show an interest in the wall-paper. The reader is also able to watch as a mere "temporary nervous depression" (153) slowly progresses to a fully delusional madness, where the speaker is no longer able to distinguish herself from an imaginary woman in the wall-paper.

When the speaker first arrives in the house, she spends a great deal of time and attention on the house, and her surroundings. She is excited about the "delicious garden" and the chintz hangings in the downstairs room (153). The wall-paper doesn’t rate a mention until we get towards the end of the first segment (154). In the second segment, although the speaker’s focus begins with her relationship with John, and keeps jumping to things like the furniture and John’s sister, it keeps circling back to the yellow wall-paper, and we get both the first mention of the "eyes" (155) and the earliest descriptions of the "sub-pattern" (156). By the third segment, although there is a mention of the holidays and a visit from "mother and Nellie and the children" (156), the wall-paper has already invaded the speaker’s thoughts to the point where even she is forced to admit "It dwells in [her] mind so!" (157) Most of the forth segment describes her weakness and her relationship with John, with the wall-paper only mentioned at the end, although it is here that the second pattern is described as a creeping woman for the first time (158). From then on out it becomes apparent that the primary focus of the speaker is the wall-paper and little else. Only once more does she even worry over her condition and her inability to make her feelings understood to her husband (159), and after that the only time she even mentions other people, it is in reference to the paper itself (160, 161, 163).

Eventually, this obsession changes in nature. In fact, as the story progresses, the speaker becomes increasingly paranoid and fearful that some other might try to figure out "her" riddle. The first hint of this possessiveness concerning the wall-paper occurs when the speaker begins to talk about how she is the only one to have noticed that the paper changes as the light changes, but before long she begins to associate the oddness of her husband and his sister’s behaviors with the wall-paper, and mentions having caught the other two looking at it. Speaker’s attitude is as though the others were intruding on her somehow by doing so (160). This segment ends with a clear statement of territorialism as the speaker declares that she is determined that nobody shall find out the pattern but herself (161).

Soon she is worried about telling her husband things for fear that he might make her leave the paper instead of worried about trying to convince her husband to take her away (161). It isn’t much later that the speaker has become so paranoid that she will not even write things she has "found" in her private journal, as exemplified by the quote, "I have found out another funny thing, but I shan’t tell it this time! It does not do to trust people too much" (163). Indeed, she is no longer trusting at all by now, for while earlier in the story the speaker describes her husband as loving, kind, and wise (154, 158), by this point in the story she says instead that he only "pretended to be very loving and kind" and declares immediately that she can see through him (163). Statements like these prepare the reader for the point near the end of the story when the speaker proclaims, "no person touches this paper but me, -not alive!" (163)

The first-person point of view also helps to highlight the speaker’s increasing inability to distinguish reality from fantasy. Early on, the speaker recognizes when she’s being especially imaginative, such as when she discusses the house’s "ghostliness" (153) and when she talks of how she fancies seeing people walking in the garden (155). In these segments of the story, when the narrator describes the wall-paper, she tends to use simile. For example, she describes a recurrent spot that is "like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes" (155, emphasis mine). What’s more, although the speaker attributes expression to the wall-paper, she compares it to the sort of personalities people will often attribute inanimate objects (156). Even when she first goes into an in-depth description of the pattern, she describes it in terms one would use for a particularly ugly, bizarre pattern rather than a living thing (157). It is not until the start of the fifth segment that the speaker talks about how the pattern seems to move as a result of the way the light hits it, and by the end she speaks as it as though it were really moving when she admits to laying "there for hours trying to decide whether that front pattern and the back pattern really did move together or separately" (159). By page 162, the narrator has begun to believe that the wall-paper not only moves, but that the woman in it gets out as she reports seeing that woman outside in the windows. What’s worse, she has begun to mimic the creeping woman herself, reporting that she "always lock[s] the door when [she] creep[s] by daylight" (162). By the end of the story, the poor woman fully believes that the wall-paper is a living thing, as she reports it laughing at her, and although she originally tries to pull the wall-paper out in an attempt to let the woman inside out, by the end of the final segment, she is convinced that she is creeping woman who came out of the wall-paper (165).

No other point of view could have possibly highlighted the nameless victim’s slide into madness. The speaker hid too much from the other characters for their points of view to have been any use, while looking at her behavior from a third-person objective viewpoint would have just left the reader baffled. Third-person limited or third-person omniscient might have been able to accomplish a little more, but to have someone else tell you, "She wondered if the creeping women she imagined she saw had come out of the wall-paper in the same way she believed she had," feels far more distant than the question "I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did" (164)? Seeing things up close and personal, through her eyes, increases the reader’s compassion for the hapless character and makes her end remarks all the more chilling. We feel as though we have been trapped within the room with her, but unlike the speaker of the story, who is left creeping round in round in her groove (165), we are, in the end, finally able to escape from the yellow wall-paper.