By the end of the story, the protagonist begins to have difficulty separating herself from her visions of the woman in the wallpaper. She starts to imagine that she herself might, in fact, be the woman she has been seeing during the duration of her stay in the house. She beings to "creep" in the same fashion as the woman she's seen in the wallpaper, as well as tear down the paper that she feels has kept "her" (she is now the woman in the paper) prisoner during the story. As a final act she locks herself in her room and refuses to respond to the calls of her husband to open the door and be seen.
While it is true that the protagonist's actions fit the formal definition of hysteria - a condition characterized by "exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement" - saying that she has become "hysterical" herself is a difficult statement to make, primarily because of the purpose of the story. The author's purpose in writing the story was an indictment of the treatment of women by the patriarchal society they lived. This society blamed the "hysterical" condition of women for their illnesses, and in order to combat these illnesses they often found it necessary to seclude women in order to combat the perceived hysteria. The irony of this, something the story is attempting to point out, is the ill-treatment of women in order to cure they're "hysteria" could have actually served as the reason for the conditions to begin with. If doctors, physicians, husbands, etc. would attempt to treat the women in their lives as equals - with respect and dignity instead of cordoning them off on their own to deal with the issues they were facing, such as "hysteria" - it would lead to a better outcome for all parties involved.
Toward the end of the story, the protagonist actually comes to believe that she is the woman that she has freed from the wallpaper. She says something about not wanting to look out the windows of her room because of all the creepy creeping women in the garden outside. Then suddenly, she says,
I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?
Earlier in the story, she works hard to free the woman she believes is trapped in the wallpaper. The narrator seems to recognize on some level that she is, herself, trapped by her "treatment," but at least she could assist this other woman to freedom. Now that she believes that she's freed this woman by ripping down all the wallpaper, she actually changes places with this woman, in her mind, perhaps because she believes this woman is now free. She even refers to someone named Jane, who we've never heard mentioned in the story before, saying to her husband,
I've got out at last . . . in spite of you and Jane! And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!
I believe that Jane is actually her own name, a name she no longer recognizes as hers because she believes that she is someone else.
Hysteria is not now recognized as an actual psychological condition. It was used, during this time, as a sort of catch-all term to describe any kind of emotional irregularity or mental illness (like depression or anxiety) that women had, like the postpartum depression from which the narrator probably suffers. I wouldn't describe her as hysterical, because her husband's "treatment" has actually caused her depression to develop into something much more severe: she no longer recognizes her own identity and now believes herself to be someone else.
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