When Hope Rattles the Cage:
Impressions and Explorations of Confinement in Women's Autobiographical
Writings
Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind [the front pattern], and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to crawl through. But nobody could climb through that pattern -- it strangles so [...].
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper
The generosity of the word confinement, when applied to women's lives, is chilling. Not limited (confined?) by any one definition or area, confinement opens its arms to embrace multitudinous aspects of a woman's life: her physical location (a sickbed, a childbed, an attic, a nun's cell); the clothes she wears (corsets, foundation garments, high heels, a habit); the roles she is expected to fulfill (dutiful daughter, devoted wife, undemanding inspiration, selfless mother); lack of sufficient resources (monetary or otherwise). The confinements of women vary from culture to culture and era to era, both in number and in scope. We have only to look at women's own stories -- the ones they have been able to tell us, the ones that have survived -- to know this.
The index entry for confinement in Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert's landmark text The Madwoman in the Attic reads as follows: "Confinement. See Architecture; Claustrophobia; Maternity; Prisons." Using this index entry as a road map, we can designate four main trajectories of confinement to be found in women's lives, and thus in women's writings: the confinement of location, or place; the confinement of the mind (including claustrophobia and its sister agoraphobia, as well as full-flown madness in its many forms); the confinement of female roles (especially motherhood); and the confinement of sheer physical imprisonment.
Any one of these confinements can serve to keep a woman quiet, to restrain her from telling her story as surely as ropes or chains (or apron strings or umbilical cords) restrain her from any "unwomanly" behavior, and every woman's story that is told fights against these shackles and causes them to fall away.
One need not be a Chamber -- to be Haunted --
One need not be a House --
The Brain has Corridors -- surpassing
Material Place --
-- Emily Dickinson
What happens to a woman when she is confined? Why are women confined in the first place? Sometimes the reason is something as arbitrary as circumstance: perhaps the socioeconomic station of one's family, an illness, or a move to isolated territory. Yet looking at the instances where women are confined not of their own will reveals that usually her confinement is something that is done "for her own good" -- often by a husband, father or even sometimes a female authority figure, and usually specifically related to her roles as a mother or wife, either preparing her for these roles or keeping her fit for them, or even keeping her away from them if she has been somehow deemed unable to execute them sufficiently well.
Although very often confinement is forced upon them, women can choose to do this to themselves; sometimes we do find a woman in a self-imposed confinement, which, depending on the circumstances, can be done either as a healthy quest for rare solitude or as an unhealthy, fearful response to the open world outside. So even when a woman does it to herself, we can often find that she is seeking to effect some kind of remedy for a self-perceived affliction and thinks she will be better off this way. Everyone needs to be alone now and then, but solitude and isolation enforced past a certain point can often have disastrous results, and it does not matter whether the enforcer is an outside agent or one's own self.
Yet even while making these distinctions among types of confinement, and seeking the reasons behind confinement, it is important to understand that, just as they are unlimited, these categories and causes are by no means disconnected or separate from each other; two or more can be seen as overlapping in the lives of many different women at different times in those lives, weaving a strangling pattern of limitation and imprisonment for women of all classes, cultures and ages, and through which only some manage to crawl -- although many can be found shaking the bars. The writing of their stories, and of the stories of women who could not write their own, rattle the cage... and sometimes a woman escapes.
Next... Creating a claustrophobia of the brain
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