Imagery and Madness in Yellow Wallpaper A major theme in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper" is that solitary confinement and Exclusion of the public leads to madness. . The use of imagery and settings helps illustrate this theme throughout the story. The unnamed protagonist of this story suffers from a nervous disorder heightened by her feeling of being trapped in a room. The setting of the vast colonial mansion and in particular the child's bedroom with barred windows gives an image of solitude and isolation experienced by the protagonist. Another important setting is the mansion connected by a “shady alley” (66) to the magnificent bay and private dock. It is possible that in her mind she sees a path that leads to recovery from her illness where happiness and good health await her in the end. The reason the path is "shaded" is because it is unclear whether this path can be traveled or not. Upon moving into the mansion, she immediately becomes obsessed with the nursery's wallpaper with its "sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin" (64). Her days and nights go so smoothly that she finds relief in writing a diary, which becomes more and more tedious as her illness progresses. In every few paragraphs of her diary, she analyzes the wallpaper. Through the images she conjures up on the wallpaper, we can see that she is actually analyzing herself and her illness unconsciously. For example, she begins to see “a kind of strange, provocative, formless silhouette that seems to be hiding behind this ridiculous and visible facade design” (67). She describes her illness (as seen in the wallpaper) as "being governed by no laws of radiation, nor of alternation, nor of repetition, nor of symmetry, nor anything else of which I never heard of it” (68). In other words, she doesn't understand what's causing her illness. A pivotal moment in the story is when the female protagonist only cares about the yellow wallpaper in her diary. Instead of her obsession with the wallpaper, she engages in the actions of the women she sees in the wallpaper, which, of course, are actually her own actions. The woman “keeps trying to climb through [the wallpaper]” (72). Right now, she's desperate to escape her illness, but she can't because being locked in the room has already affected her more than she realizes. The imagery of this situation is described when “the pattern suffocates [the women], turns them upside down and turns their eyes white! » (72). At the end or on his last day at the mansion, the isolation intensifies his illness to the point that it is no longer curable and madness takes over. The protagonist finally recognizes that the women she witnesses are actually her own state of mind and proclaims "I'll have to get back behind the model when the night comes, and it's hard!" (75). She believes she has finally freed herself from the disease when in reality, the exact opposite has happened. The incessant crawling is the final summary of his madness.