Space and Domesticity in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Abstract
This article deals with Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” 1892 in the context of the interplay, at the end of the nineteenth century, between gender and family roles on the one hand, and questions of space and domesticity on the other. Gilman understood quite well that confinement to household work did not prepare women to join modern society and that spatial arrangements between the sexes are socially created. She believed that when such arrangements provide access to valued knowledge for men while reducing that possibility for women, the organization of space becomes a crucial factor in perpetuating status differences. I therefore also aim to provide in this article an understanding of gender inequalities from the viewpoint of the architectural spatial contexts within which they occur, as reflected in Gilman
References
- Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. 1817. London: The Softback Preview, 1996.
- Berkin, Carol Ruth. “Private Woman, Public Woman: The Contradictions of Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” Women of America, A History. Eds. Carol Ruth Berkin and Mary Beth Norton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979. 151-171.
- Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
- The Forerunner. A Monthly Magazine. New York: The Charlton Company. v. 1-7. Nov. 1909-Dec. 1916.
- Fryer, Judith. Felicitous Space. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
- Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” 1892. The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader. Ed. Ann J. Lane. London: Woman’s Press, 1981. 3-19.
- Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. 1898. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966.
- Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Home: Its Work and Influence. 1903. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972.
- Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. What Diantha Did. 1912. The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader. Ed. Ann J. Lane. London: Woman’s Press, 1981.
- Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. 1915. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979.