When Hope Rattles the Cage:
Impressions and Explorations of Confinement
in Women's Autobiographical Writings
1,2,3,4
He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies [...]. I think sometimes that if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me. But I find I get pretty tired when I try.
-- Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper
The prohibition on writing as part of a means to confine a woman is an integral element in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wall-Paper (a piece that, despite its brevity, touches on all four of the categories listed by Gilbert and Gubar), and makes for a most potent "cure" -- driving the woman who has no place left but her own mind out of that mind, creating a claustrophobia of the brain that forces her out into the formless world of madness.
The woman in this story starts out as merely suffering from what is likely post-partum depression, yet she is not given even the room to work out on her own what might help her bounce back to her pre-birth self. She is herself characterized as a child, subject to flights of fancy and incapable of making her own judgements, and even put up in a room she thinks was once a nursery (although its trappings -- suspicious rings on the wall, bars on the windows -- almost suggest a dungeon to the reader). Her husband does not want her to write, and so she steals her writing time bit by bit, chronicling her own disintegration as she is drawn into the pattern on the wall, a pattern whose serpentine and constricting ugliness comes to symbolize, not only the heroine's imprisonment, but the vulnerability of women in general to such a fate.
Tracing the patterns on the wall, the heroine tracks her own undoing, sees her own fate, dances her own descent; but she also follows the same path so many women have followed before and after her. The heroine sees sometimes one woman, sometimes many women, trapped in the pattern of the wallpaper; it is only writing and the use of one's own voice that will pull them out, alive, rather than creeping on the floor and driven to, if not suicide, a kind of self-death by the impact of one's stifled voice battering against the tight confines of her imprisoned mind.
Gilman knew of what she wrote, for she herself had been subjected to such a "cure" some years before The Yellow Wall-Paper was published, and nearly went mad herself. This work is said to have changed the opinion of her former physician about the efficacy of his treatments; we cannot help but wonder, without an outlet such as the one Gilman found for herself, how many other women had been drawn creeping into the wall-paper before this epiphany... or how many more would subsequently be taken in, if not by the good doctor, then by the patterns of constriction arranged by some other, well-meaning soul.
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet [...] who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to.
-- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
In her extended essay A Room Of One's Own, Virginia Woolf asks, "Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?" If it is true that the most effective way to shut a woman up (as in, keep her quiet) is to call her crazy, then it is equally true (if not more so) that the most effective way to drive a woman crazy is to shut her up -- where "to shut her up" means not only to stifle her voice but more primarily to confine her to a small, isolated space, physical or psychological, in which she has little or no chance for interaction with others or expression of self. Virginia Woolf emphasizes the importance of a room of one's own with a lock on the door, and suggests that the door's lock means the ability to think for one's self.
Using that metaphor, then, a room without a lock, or with a lock on the outside, is a space that cramps, constricts, encloses and binds a woman's self-examination, self-determination, and any sovereignty she might have over her own mind's ability to turn on her spirit and devour it whole. And the room, obviously, can be a literal enclosed space or a situational one -- the madwoman can emerge in the attic or just in the mind of a woman who has been driven past the point where she can restrain that shadow side of herself. If we are unable to let her out, if the heat and violence of her heart has been caught and tangled in the body of our imprisonment, she will very likely turn on us and destroy us.
And the end can come quickly and dramatically or quietly and after a long period of time. Even Virginia Woolf, of whom no one can say did not have a literary outlet for nearly all her life, eventually walked into the water, pockets full of stones, to escape the despair confined inside her.
Next... Drowning in darkness
1,2,3,4
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