Give Me Some Room to Think!!

One idea that seems to be consistently popping up in the literature that we’ve recently been studying is the suggestion that suppression of expression can—and did, in the past—lead to psychological problems. In layman’s terms, some of our authors have suggested that the patriarchal society was responsible for the minds of brilliant women being figuratively “lost.” In Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” we are introduced to a woman who is sick with “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” (368). However, as the story progresses, we see that the narrator is allowed very little freedom by her husband, who she also says “hates to have me write a word” (370). She tells us that her husband’s sister “thinks it is the writing which made [her] sick,” (371). However, I would like to suggest the exact opposite: that it was not her writing that made her “sick,” but rather her lack of freedom to do so openly. The narrator seems to have some of the most distinguishable qualities of a writer imbedded in her, but her “imaginative power and habit of story-making” are “a nervous weakness” in the eyes of her husband (371). Like the character of Judith Shakespeare introduced to us by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, this woman’s gift for writing and freedom of expression are suppressed by the patriarchal society around her. Woolf tells us that “it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty” (49). Indeed, we see that Judith Shakespeare winds up killing herself, and the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” basically loses her mind. Perhaps when Woolf spoke of the imperativeness of “a room of one’s own” to the writer, she was speaking of more than just a physical room. We began exploring this idea in class by suggesting that the mind itself can be seen as a “room of one’s own,” but I would like to take this one step further. I think that the word “room” can be interpreted in two different ways here. It refers to the actual physical space in which an author has to work, but I think it can also refer to figurative space for her mind to wander and explore. A writer’s mind needs “room” to think, or it just might lose itself.