Culture in Closed Spaces: Symbolic Setting in “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of those stories that is inevitable in anthologies and literature classes as an example of American women's writing at the turn of the century. Truth be told, few of were published. I'm not interested in a discussion of the history of gender politics, but it's hard not to discuss them when dealing with “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

The story was published in 1892 after Gilman herself had been prescribed the rest cure, a.k.a. confinement and the patient is allowed minimal physical movement in the hopes of calming the patient's nerves. Yes, this was a thing. While Gilman's story was a criticism of this practice, it has remained a significant piece of feminist literature to this day because it is so telling of the culture surrounding women at the time, and Gilman beautifully and eerily encapsulates it inside a single room.

The story is set in a former nursery, with the eponymous yellow wallpaper, where the wife of a physician is taking her rest cure: she is not allowed to leave the room. This lone room has a mounted bed and sits at the top of the house, with views of the entire state. Through barred windows. And she keeps seeing the image of a woman creeping in the wallpaper.

The bars make for some easy setting-symbolism: it’s a prison. But the bars are only one part of this setting’s symbolism. The narrator suggests the room is a former nursery. By being placed and kept inside, this woman – a new mother – is actually being infantilized. The rest cure basically prescribes she stay in bed around the clock. She's like a baby, kept inside, with bars on the windows meaning not just a prison, but even the bars on a crib. Even the wallpaper itself is confining, with its obtuse patterns and the woman inside the wallpaper likewise trapped. It isn't much of a stretch to draw parallels between the creeping woman in the wallpaper and the woman in the room.

At the time of the story's publication, 1892, women didn't really have a voice in American culture; this is part of the reason the same stories by women at this time period reappear in literature courses and anthologies. Universal Women's suffrage in the US was 28 years away, and World War II, the first major move of women from the domestic sphere to the workplace was about 50 years away. The Victorian era notion of “the Angel in the Home,” that a woman's role was to stay in the home and turn it into a bastion of goodness for her husband to come home to was the predominant ideal.

While Gilman specifically said she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a response to her atrocious experience with the rest cure, it can also be read as a criticism of this Victorian era mentality – perceiving women as fragile, needing to be put away and relegated to the domestic sphere. The physical space of the room where all the action takes place represents the condition of women at this point in time: confined. Gilman just used the physical space of a claustrophobic room to symbolize it.

Take this symbolic parallel a step further and think about what it means when the narrator tries to move the bed and sets about tearing down the wallpaper. After all, settings aren't simply backdrops the characters never interact with: it's important to consider how characters interact with their settings. She doesn't to go Bertha Mason and resort to arson, but she sets about tearing down the wallpaper to free the woman trapped inside. It's a story about a woman driven mad by the cultural pressures that keep her inside and her lone battle against it, to free herself and women in general.

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Works Cited

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. W.W. Norton, 2013. ###-###. Print.

Just Where Is It? An Overview of Setting

Setting is an important part of a story, but it can be helpful to break it down in order to better identify what it is and how and why it appears. In my post on “Volar” I alluded to the nuances that Setting can take. Specifically, Setting can be described in four different but related ways:

• Spatial: This parameter deals with the physical setting, ranging from natural and rural settings like: mountains, forests, deserts, and even man made features like buildings, rooms, roads, etc.
• Political: Cities, states, nations. This is when a setting is bounded by a man-specified, but not necessarily man-made boundary. This includes countries, cities, counties, etc.
• Temporal: When does the story take place, and how long it takes.
• Cultural: When peoples or groups share a common heritage that, despite spatial or political differences, brings them together. The easiest way to think of this is in terms of religion. If you attend a religious service in one country and the same one in a different country, you can expect there to be some similarities.

A story like Robert Galbraith's Cuckoo's Calling has a clear political setting: London. But this also means it has distinct spatial settings as well, as London is a major urban area. Cultural setting gets trickier, especially as the spatial setting gets larger and the political setting gets a greater population density. For example, Cuckoo's Calling follows a private detective as he has to deal with people from a few distinct subcultures: the fashion industry, law offices, and half-way homes. The sequel, The Silkworm, still largely takes place in London, but deals with the publishing industry juxtaposed against a different class of lower income than that found in Cuckoo’s Calling. Any given spatial or political location will have different cultural settings, only some of which the author will use.

The next distinction to bear in mind for setting is scope. Some settings will be large and vast and others small, and most stories maneuver from one setting to another. Cuckoo's Calling doesn't leave the city proper of London, but contrast this with any fantasy epic, like The Hobbit where the characters traverse caves, forests, mountains, towns, and cities: they never stay in any one place for long. But even a city can be a large setting to deal with, while others, like “Volar” are confined to an apartment or a room, like Raskolnikov's apartment in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, or Gregor Samsa's room in Kafka's “The Metamorphosis”.

It can be difficult to separate one setting from another, especially when dealing with the scope of temporal and cultural settings. A story with a temporal setting of 1930 and a political setting of the United States of America will be very unusual if it does not have something to do with the Great Depression, i.e., The Grapes of Wrath, which will greatly shape the Cultural setting. Other settings will be more allegorical, like the film and TV show M*A*S*H, which took place during the Korean War, but were more about the Vietnam War. Other settings will be more flexible; a good example of this would be most police procedural shows.

Setting is an important part of understanding a narrative because it, quite literally, gives a backdrop to the story. It is the first way to contextualize and understand just what is going on and why it is significant. Setting, literally, grounds a narrative in a time and a place, even if they are imagined, and give us an opportunity to better understand the characters, events, and themes of a story as we better understand the world they interact with.

So, whatever you're reading, pay attention to the setting. If the author has something, a simple event or the entire story, take place somewhere or someplace specific, it's probably for a reason.