Space and Domesticity in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Year 1999, Issue: 10, 59 - 68, 01.10.1999

Anna Notaro

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

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