The Importance of Setting in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins

A review of the house itself suggests that an architectural pecking order of privacy increases level by level. At first, the house seems to foster wild-eyed sensibilities catchd by its architectural connotations, the narrator embarks upon its description immediately--it is the house that she wants to talk more or less (Gilman 11). Together with its landscape, the house is a most beautiful place that stands quite an alone . . . well back from the road, quite three miles from the village (Gilman 11). The estates grounds, moreover, brood of hedges and walls and gates that lock (Gilman 11). As such, the house and its grounds are markedly depicted as mechanisms of confinement--ancestral places situated within a legacy of incorporate and supervision. These are the exterior apparatuses that create and enforce the bedroom as a monitoring device, structuring interior space by exceeding its very boundaries, expanding beyond the egresses of the household in an effort to maintain the int erior/exterior polarity. The declaration is a privacy within the privacy of the home. The bedroom becomes the locus of what Wigley calls a secret privacy it is its own interior wrought with overtones of mystery and intrigue (345). Because the bedroom in The xanthous Wallpaper veils both sexuality and the effeminate organic structure, and is involved in the production of secrets, the bedroom and the body are united both are secret, and both contain secrets. Associated with connotations of private, intimate, enclosed space, the bedroom finally suggests other such spaces. The bedroom becomes a metaphor for the female body and makes the body manageable, controllable. Writing about the body and secrecy, Ludmilla Jordanova notes Veiling implies secrecy. Wome... ...iction. 17 (1989) 193-201. Haney-Peritz, Janice. monolithic Feminism and Literatures Ancestral House Another Look at The Yellow Wallpaper Womens Studies. 12 (1986) 113-128. Kasmer, Lisa. Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yell ow Wallpaper A Symptomatic Reading. Literature and Psychology. 36, (1990) 1-15. Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions Images of sex activity in Science and Medicine between the 18th and 20th Centuries. capital of the United Kingdom Harrester Wheatsheaf, 1989. Mulvey, Laura. Pandora Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity. Sexuality and Space. Ed. Beatriz Colomina. Princeton Princeton Papers on Architecture, 1992. 53-71. ------. Visual Pleasure and memorial Cinema. Screen. 16 (1975) 6-18. Wigley, Mark. Untitled The Housing of Pleasure. Sexuality and Space. Ed. Beatriz Colomina. Princeton Papers on Architecture, 1992. 327-389.