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

The Yellow paper - The Bedroom As the story progresses in, The Yellow Wallpaper, it is as if the space of the bedroom turns in on itself, folding in on the body as the walls take hold of it, epitomizing the storytellers growing intimacy with control. Because the fabricator experiences the bedroom in terms of Johns draconian organization, she relies on her prior experiences of home in an onset to allay the alienation and isolation the bedroom creates. Recalling her childhood bedroom, she writes, I call in what a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have, and thither was one chair that always seemed interchangeable a strong relay station . . . 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 vocalization and personal history. The narrators imagination is altog ether problematic for John, who would prohibit his wife from hike up fancifulness John says that with my imaginative cater 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 primordial aspect of creating new homes based on a continuity with the bygone 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 snapshot of an image that moves us at an unimaginable depth (6). Bachelards elasticity infers that spatial depth and expansion are contingent upon a psychological flexibility o f imagination. Gilmans narrator is notably denied this elasticity when her physician/husband attempts to counter 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 silky about it, or else meet with heavy opposition (Gilman 10).