The Importance of Setting in The Yellow Wallpaper by...

A review of the house itself suggests that an architectural hierarchy of privacy increases level by level. At first, the house seems to foster romantic sensibilities; intrigued by its architectural connotations, the narrator embarks upon its description immediately--it is the house that she wants to talk about (Gilman 11). Together with its landscape, the house is a most beautiful place that stands quite alone . . . well back from the road, quite three miles from the village (Gilman 11). The estates grounds, moreover, consist of hedges and walls and gates that lock (Gilman 11). As such, the house and its grounds are markedly depicted as mechanisms of confinement--ancestral places situated within a legacy of control and†¦show more content†¦Yet in presenting something as inaccessible and dangerous, an invitation to know and to possess is extended. The secrecy associated with female bodies is sexual and linked to the multiple associations between women and privacy. (92) The bedroom can be substituted for the female body, and thereby represents the enigma and threat generated by the concept of female sexuality in patriarchal culture (Pandora 63). Concealing sexuality but also reifying the female body as and in the forbidden space of the bedroom, John invokes spatial and bodily associations of enclosure and mystery. While the bedroom is a hermetic enclosure that never invites the social element into it, it reserves a strange voyeuristic entrance for John by way of an erotic system of locks. Recall the barred windows in the bedroom and the gate at the head of the stairs. The narrator writes, At first [John] meant to repaper the room, but afterwards he said that I was letting it get the better of me, and that nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such fancies. He said that after the wall-paper was changed it would be the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on. (Gilman 14) It is as if the bedroom is a bulwark that works to maintain the observer and the observed in their subsequent positions, upholding the hierarchy of the house. The spatialShow MoreRelatedAnalysis Of The Yellow Wallpaper By Charlotte Perkins Gilman1269 Words   |  6 PagesFebruary 2017 Analysis of â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper† Life during the 1800s for a woman was rather distressing. Society had essentially designated them the role of being a housekeeper and bearing children. They had little to no voice on how they lived their daily lives. Men decided everything for them. 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