The Bedroom inThe Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman :: Yellow Wallpaper essays

The Yellow cover - The Bedroom As the story progresses in, The Yellow Wallpaper, it is as if the space of the sleeping room turns in on itself, folding in on the body as the walls take hold of it, epitomizing the cashiers growing intimacy with control. Because the vote counter experiences the bedroom in terms of Johns draconian organization, she relies on her prior experiences of home in an sample to allay the alienation and isolation the bedroom creates. Recalling her childhood bedroom, she writes, I think about what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and in that location was one chair that always seemed equivalent a strong partner . . . I could always hop into that chair and feel safe (Gilman 17). Ironically, Gilmans narrator cannot retire to the otherwise personal haven of the bedroom because she is always already there, enclosed within the attic room of Johns desires, bereft of her own function and personal history. The narrators imagination is altogether problematic for John, who would prohibit his wife from move on fancifulness John says that with my imaginative personnel and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try (Gilman 15-16). For Gaston Bachelard, who devotes himself to a phenomenological exploration of the home in The Poetics of Space, imaginative power is the nucleus of the home, if not the home itself. Memories of prior dwellings are for Bachelard a unsounded aspect of creating new homes based on a continuity with the medieval and past spaces. By approaching the house images with care not to break up the solidarity of memory and imagination, writes Bachelard, we may hope to make others feel all the mental walkover of an image that moves us at an unimaginable depth (6). Bachelards elasticity infers that spatial depth and expansion are contingent upon a psychological fle xibility of imagination. Gilmans narrator is notably denied this elasticity when her physician/husband attempts to proscribe her from writing. I did write for a while in spite of them, the narrator explains, but it does exhaust me a good deal--having to be so clever about it, or else meet with heavy opposition (Gilman 10).