The Four Walls

                                                     

“Sitting by the window” in her “atrocious nursery”, the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper clearly confides in her readers in a communication that is impermissible and forbidden. “There comes John, and I must put this away, - he hates to have me write a word.” The narrator’s husband has diagnosed her with a “temporary nervous depression” and she has been warned by him “not to give way to fancy”. This confinement to the four walls of the room in the rented house makes her develop a great fondness to not only the “big room” but also the “horrid paper” on the wall. As she begins to confide her thoughts to the “dead paper”, she gives a safe passage to her thoughts. She constantly asks her husband to provide her with another room and he makes a “bargain” to let her have the cellar to herself. She soon begins to obsess with the pattern and color of the wallpaper and finds women crawling behind the wallpaper. In order to liberate the woman that the narrator feels is imprisoned and trapped inside; she begins to tear off the wallpaper. She finally gathers to courage to liberate herself. "I've got out at last, and I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back" The narrator is finally able to liberate the woman creeping out the wallpaper.

Bertha Mason, the madwoman in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is locked up in the attic by her husband, Mr. Rochester on grounds that she is “mad” and belongs to a “mad family; “idiots and maniacs through three generations”. Her life is filled with oppression as she is locked away in a hidden room in Thornfield Hall. This is one way to keep her madness locked away from the world outside.

In Kate Chopin’s Story of an Hour, as Mrs. Mallard goes “away to her room alone”, she sits on a chair that faces the open window. The open window gives way to “a new spring life”; “the delicious breath of rain”, “the notes of a distant song” and the “twittering” of birds all symbolizes freedom for her as she had heard the news of her husband’s death. The “subtle and elusive to name” freedom and liberty that came crawling to her as she sat facing the open window is the very same “joy that kills” her in the end. The “powerful will” that had dominated her life is no longer present and she is now “drinking in a very elixir of life”. The open window displays abundance of life and the opportunity for Mrs. Mallard to escape the walls of the house. In contrast to the open window, the walls of the house represent her old life where “men and women have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow- creature.”  

An example from the Restoration Drama of the shield of the confined space provided to women would be the garden scene from Aphra Behn’s The Rover. As Florinda steps out of the house and roams around in the garden, she is no longer under the protective shield or cover of her brother or father. Hence, WIllmore, the wanderer, mistakes her for an “errant harlot” who has her “cobweb door set open to catch flies”. This walled space was like a shield to her that showed her as a maid of quality and honor. The stepping out of that shield meant her to be tagged as a harlot.

Ismat Chughtai explores the female sexuality in her short story The Quilt. The story shows how Begum Jan was a “possession” who was installed along with the furniture in the house by Nawab Saheb. “Having married Begum Jan, he (Nawab Saheb) tucked her away in the house with his other possessions and promptly forgot her.” This lack of emotional and sexual fulfillment in marriage results in the freedom of Begum Jan and Rabbu within the four walls of Begum Jan’s room that is well portrayed by the narrator as “an elephant struggling inside” of her quilt and the “slurping sound of a cat licking a plate”. Chughtai presents this intimate relationship as one woman’s way of overcoming the vacancy of the unfulfilled sexual and domestic needs by her husband. The four walls provide her with a liberty to express her sexuality.   

Jane in The Yellow Wallpaper was diagnosed with “temporary nervous depression, Bertha Mason was “mad”, Mrs. Mallard “was afflicted with a heart trouble”, and Begum Jan “was afflicted with a persistent itch”. They are all diseased and are confined inside the house.

However, the four walls can be both a means of confinement and one of liberty. As Virginia Woolf puts it in her A Room of One’s Own, “a woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write fiction.”

Woolf admires the differences between men and women, and centres her essay on why women have not been able to develop and enhance their own personal technique and design in the sphere of fiction. For Woolf, a room will help women to liberate themselves through their writings and be able to reach out to a large world.

I’d like to conclude by saying that even in their confinement, women have found a way to liberate and release themselves.