At the moment we are quarantining ourselves and to socially isolating at home. However as ‘social animals’ this experience of being physically apart from each other, of being consciously and deliberately isolated is punishingly hard.
To gain insight into how despite being in isolation we can remain both psychically and physically mindful, we are going to explore how the experience of ‘lock-down’ is mirrored in a 19th, and a mid 20th century art work. Specifically, we are going to look at two iconic female figures, one fictional, one real, for whom lock-down resulted in the creation of ‘diaries’ of the experience, both which express the madness of enforced containment.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Here in Part four our first ‘figure’ in lock-down, is ‘Jane’ the narrator of American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s iconic short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, first published in 1892. This is a very short story, a mere seventy-four pages, yet there is not a wasted word, and it remains a thoroughly chilling and creepy tale, still despite its age.
Jane is a young middle class American woman recovering from a mystery condition – described with typical Victorian era ambiguity, as a ‘nervous condition’. John, her physician husband has just rented a dilapidated grand country house to provide Jane with a rest cure for her ‘nerves’. Living with them is their baby, the baby’s nurse and John’s sister Jenny, though we don’t meet these characters in the story since John advises her, for the duration, to stay after from the child.
John has allowed Jane to take walks in the garden but she is forbidden to have visitors. Jane spends her time in an upstairs bedroom, resting, sleeping, and writing in her diary.
As the length of her enforced social distancing increases, Jane starts to fixate on the interior to her bedroom and the wallpaper in particular, begins to obsess her.
There are creepy clues that something awful has happened in the room, there a chew marks on the bed frame, holes in the plaster, and the wallpaper itself has been stripped off from the wall in various sections.
Jane describes the pattern on the wallpaper as ‘sprawling and flamboyant’ and the design, ‘invites and provokes’. Its contradictory, its colour is ‘repellent … revolting … a smouldering un-clean kind of yellow, more like a ‘sickly sulphur’. Yet staring at it for hours, she starts to believe that it’s coming to life and that its pattern is beginning to pulsate and shift under her gaze.
Pretty soon she notices ‘a skulking figure behind the wallpaper’ a shadowy woman who gets out of the wallpaper and ‘creeps around’ the garden by day. Only Jane can see her and then only at certain times of the day. She declares, ‘there are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows but me’.
John responds to Jane’s fears for her own mental health by calling them ‘false and foolish fancies’. But its obvious Jane is becoming unhinged; she cries all the time and is ‘alone such a good deal’.
However for Jane lock-down is as transformative as it is painful; as the inner reality of her life begins to emerge, she gains a greater understanding of how people are controlling her, and in a wider sense, how women are spatially confined and constricted by the gendered codes of Victorian society. The wallpaper thus becomes an agent of both imprisonment and freedom.
On her final, tumultuous day in the house, Jane locks herself inside the bedroom and she ‘shakes and pulls’ [at the lines in the wallpaper pattern] tearing off a long strip of it that goes all around the room.
As she tears the paper, trying to release the shadowy woman, mushroom-like tendrils emerge from the wallpaper and begin to ‘shriek’ in rage, yet Jane, on all fours now and ‘creeping’ around the skirting boards cries ‘I got out at last!’ ‘I am out in spite of you and Jane! [A reference to her old discarded self] And she proclaims, ‘I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”
At this moment John breaks into the bedroom, and faints at the scene before him. In the last line of the story Jane writes ‘Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!’
The relevance of this bizarre tale for our times is a paradoxically optimistic one. Though driven to the edge of psychotic breakdown by sheer loneliness and social isolation (distancing) Jane also ‘comes into her true self’ at the very end; she discovers her own powerful inner ‘rescuing’ urge, by successfully getting the ‘shadowy woman’ out of the wallpaper. Additionally, she develops a deep empathy for people especially women forced by circumstance or culture to live home-bound, controlled lives.
Through the pattern, Jane loses her old “perspectival point” and, to use philosopher Elizabeth Grosz’s terms, abandon herself to being spatially located by/as another.
Quoted by Mark Taylor in ‘Pattern’, in Interior Wor(l)ds*, eds Luca Basso Peressut, Imma Forino, Gennaro Postiglione, Roberto Rizzi, Allemandi & C. Italy, 2010, p233.
Georgina Downey is an art historian and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide who has published widely on the domestic interior in art. She has received an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travel Grant (2006) and University of Adelaide small research grants. Her most recent books are Domestic Interiors: Representing Home from the Victorians to the Moderns, (2013) and Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (edited with Anca Lasc and Mark Taylor 2015) both published by Bloomsbury. Her next project is a chapter 'Under Siege: the wartime interior in art' for her co-edited anthology with Mark Taylor and Terry Meade Domesticity Under Siege: when home isn’t safe to be published by Bloomsbury in 2021.