Spinster (38 page)

The combination of dark blue floral wallpaper with Willy's cornflower-blue eyes and yellow hair had reminded me of something. Back home that night, I searched my bookshelves. There it was: a paperback copy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story “The Yellow Wall-paper.”

The piece first appeared in the relatively short-lived literary periodical
The New England Magazine
in January 1892. The original version opens with a pen-and-ink illustration of a young
woman sitting in a rocking chair beside a barred window. She's wearing a long dress with a fitted bodice and puffed shoulders, and her hair is smoothed neatly into a bun. There's a pad of paper on her lap, a pen in her hand. The caption tells us what she's writing: “I am sitting by the Window in this Atrocious Nursery.”

Our unnamed heroine and her well-intentioned if maddeningly patronizing physician husband, John, have rented a colonial mansion for three months, to aid her recovery from a nervous breakdown after the birth of their first child.

For the couple's bedroom, she'd wanted the one downstairs that opened onto the piazza, but “John would not hear of it” and insisted they take the nursery at the top of the house. The windows are barred, presumably so children won't fall out. The wallpaper is torn off in great patches, and as for what remains, “I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.” She continues:

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smoldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

When she protests, John takes her in his arms and calls her “a blessed little goose.”

Aside from the wallpaper, she actually likes the room, which sounds not unlike Edith Wharton's—big and airy, with views of the garden and bay. Though, in truth, she's Edith's inverse: a defenseless renter, not a lordly owner, confined to a bed that's
inexplicably nailed to the floor, longing to write, but forbidden to, on doctor's orders.

Things only get worse. She begins to suspect that the wallpaper has a consciousness, and knows full well its vicious influence: “There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck, and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.”

Angry, she declares, “I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have!” To soothe herself, she indulges wistful remembrances of inanimate objects past. “What a kindly wink the knobs of our big, old bureau used to have,” she muses, and there was that one chair in particular that “always seemed like a strong friend.”

Before long she detects the shape of a woman trapped in the pattern, stooped and creeping about, shaking at it, as if trying to get out.

Our heroine becomes fixated on this figure. She must free her. She will free her. And so she does. But the conclusion is left intentionally vague. By freeing the woman in the wall, did our heroine liberate herself, or go irretrievably mad?

The closing illustration in
The New England Magazine
is provocatively enigmatic. John is splayed on the floor, distraught, among strips of torn wallpaper. His wife leans over his prostrate body, her hair loosened now and falling forward like a curtain. Whether she's consoling him, or just double-checking to confirm that he's unconscious before she makes a break for it, is unclear.

One night over Thai takeout at my apartment Willy mentioned that she was sick of living on the Lower East Side and could use some extra cash besides. From some dim, forgotten corner of my mind I felt a lightbulb fizz awake.

“Please,” I said. “Sublet out your place at a profit. Stay here. Check my mail or something. Burn it down.”

I had a knife in my boot: Newburyport.

That night I bought an Amtrak ticket. In a month I'd be thirty-eight. Exactly a decade since I'd moved to New York. Ten years—a tight, round noose of a number. On the train, I tried to take stock of what I'd gained and lost in ten years' time.

By any reasonable measure, slinking back to my childhood home was a form of failure. There are those who say big cities warp otherwise ordinary citizens into callow hedonists. We never grow up. We're too selfish, too picky, on constant lookout for someone more attractive or successful than whomever we're already with. We're incapable of making the compromises necessary to sharing ourselves with a partner. As with those nineteenth-century women who left abusive marriages, we're told we're unable to accept reality for what it is.

When I stepped off the train in Boston and saw my father waiting, his curly hair that had stayed dark for so long now completely gray, I knew I'd made the right decision. Those measures of adulthood were someone else's, not mine.

As we turned onto our street, my heart caught in my throat, and I thought of Edna Millay's poem “Ashes of Life”:

Life goes on forever like the gnawing of a mouse,—

And to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow

There's this little street and this little house.

Edith Wharton created her home in her own image. Maeve Brennan never had a home of her own. Charlotte Perkins Gilman simply absconded with the concept altogether. The sort of person
who knew from a very young age exactly what she wanted to do with her life, Charlotte had a will so ferocious that even bad luck couldn't weaken it.

Not long after she was born, in 1860 (just two years before Edith Wharton), her father started to make himself scarce, and eventually took off for good, leaving her fragile, unresourceful mother to raise two children alone, on very little money; over the next eighteen years they moved among rooming houses, relatives' homes, and even a “cooperative household,” for a total of nineteen times in all, eventually settling in Providence, Rhode Island. Rather than focus on these deprivations, Charlotte responded with characteristic pragmatism: she took from her weak, unloving mother the example of exactly how not to be, and from her absent father access to one of New England's most distinguished families.

Among her earliest memories was a visit to the “wonder house” that her father's aunt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had built in Hartford, Connecticut, with the proceeds from her bestselling anti-slavery novel,
Uncle Tom's Cabin
. Stowe and her sisters—the prominent suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, and the never-married Catharine Beecher, author of what's been called America's first complete guide to housekeeping (when keeping house was as demanding as a full-time job)—were the lights by which the young girl guided herself. In 1855, anticipating Betty Friedan by more than a century, Catharine had pronounced domestic despair a nationwide epidemic. As she wrote about marriage in her book
Letters to the People on Health and Happiness
:

How many young hearts have revealed the fact, that what they had been trained to imagine the highest earthly felicity, was but the beginning of care, disappointment, and sorrow, and often led to the extremity of mental and physical suffering.

At seventeen Charlotte declared in her diary that she would never be confined to the home as a mere wife and mother. She was going to devote her life to public service.

Her biographer Cynthia J. Davis considers the ages between sixteen and twenty to represent Charlotte's “declaration of independence.” She writes, “The love, guidance, and sense of belonging she had yearned for futilely in her personal life became the governing principles of her avowedly impersonal religion of public service.”

By now Charlotte was tall and strong, with long, curly brown hair. She began a course of self-improvement by teaching herself discipline. First she created arbitrary exercises—for instance, “get out of bed at thirteen minutes to seven.” Once she'd mastered those, she turned to cultivating thoughtfulness, tact, and honesty, along with more corporal virtues. After studying physiology and hygiene, she adopted a daily exercise routine—gymnastics, an hour of brisk walking, running a seven-minute mile on her toes, and twenty-five repetitions of five different ways to lift two-pound weights—augmented with a cold sponge bath, early to bed, and open windows while sleeping. She swore off caffeine and corsets and for the rest of her life wore only comfortable clothes.

In 1878 she enrolled in the inaugural class of the Rhode Island School of Design, and the following year she was credentialed to teach art. Like Neith, Edna, and Edith at this age, she was also writing poetry; in 1880 her first publication, “To D.G.”—the initials stand not for a person, but for dandelion greens—appeared in the
New England Journal of Education
. By twenty-one, she'd resolved to never marry. She'd fallen into passionate, sexless love with her friend Martha Luther and decided that this close, fulfilling friendship was all she needed. As she wrote to her beloved in 1881:

I am really getting glad not to marry…. If I let that business alone, and go on in my own way; what I gain in individual strength and development of personal power of character,
myself as a self
, you know, not merely as a woman, or that useful animal a wife and mother, will, I think, make up, and more than make up in usefulness and effect, for the other happiness that part of me would enjoy.

Not only would a future together allow them to reconcile the irreconcilable poles of love and work, but to extend their happiness to the social body as a whole. In another letter to Martha she wrote:

And bye & bye if we both persist in scorning matrimony, what joy to be, besides perfectly happy ourselves, a burning and a shining light to all our neighbors, a place where all delightful people congregate, a house wherein young and guileless aspirants for literary or various fame shall believe and tremble. Houp la! We'll be happy anyway.