Belatedly...our trailer!

Thanks to Philip Sheerin, who made this.

The Yellow Wallpaper and the Panopticon

by Alyson Cummins, designer of The Yellow Wallpaper

I first came across The Yellow Wallpaper at college, where I briefly studied it as part of a module on consciousness. I was delighted when Aoife, our director, approached me last year about her idea to do a stage adaptation.  

The text is such a finely crafted, economical piece of work that it has been a very real challenge from the beginning. I think this challenge comes mainly from the fact that the language is so descriptive; she paints such a vivid picture, not only of her state of mind but also of her surroundings, which are so closely linked to her mental state. Trying to retain this for an audience member, as opposed to a reader, is one of the main things I have been striving to achieve. 

In the earlier stages of the design process I became very preoccupied with a building designed in the 18^th Century called the Panopticon. It is as much a political and architectural thesis around space and power as it is a design for a building. The original design was for a prison, but its designer Jeremy Bentham thought it could be adapted for any kind of institutional building. It is most succinctly described on Wikipedia:

“The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe all inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they are being watched. The design comprises a circular structure with an "inspection house" at its centre, from which the managers or staff are able to watch the inmates, who are stationed around the perimeter. 

Bentham himself described the Panopticon as "a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.””

I was drawn to the idea of power and control being exercised through a person’s environment in light of and with regard to the heroine of The Yellow Wallpaper. I became more interested in the relationship between the protagonist and the individual audience member rather than trying to create a naturalistic environment for the action to take place in. 

The Panopticon model is also rather like a theatre in the round, except that the relationship is in reverse, because the person in the centre of the circular space is lit and is the focus of attention for those around the perimeter who are in darkness. Our production will be are staged in the Boys School at Smock Alley, which gives us the opportunity to place an audience on at least three sides of the space with the stage in the centre, and so this idea of the Panopticon and the power structure--as well as the opportunity to subvert it--really intruiged me. 

Behind the Yellow Wallpaper: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Doppelgängers

by Tanya Dean, dramaturg of The Yellow Wallpaper

             Can I, who suffer from the wild unrest

                              Of two strong natures claiming each its due,

                              And can not tell the greater of the two;

                          Who have two spirits ruling in breast

                          Alternately, and know not which is

                               And which the owner true.

                                     

                                     Untitled poem by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 

                                                                1 April 1883.

While researching for dramaturgy packet for The Yellow Wallpaper, I become increasingly intrigued by how much of this story of a young woman increasingly trapped  in her own mind was motivated by the internal struggles of its author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The young female protagonist frets that her “nervous depression” has kept her from fulfilling her marital obligations: “It does weigh on me so not to do my duty in any way! I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already!” 

By contrast, Gilman (1860 – 1935) felt a constant struggle between her traditional and radical ideologies. She saw herself as composed of two sides: in letters to a girlhood friend, Martha Luther, she explained how she saw one, "the mother side," as that part of herself that existed "merely as a woman" and disparaged it as "that useful animal a wife and a mother." She thought, however, that satisfying its claims might give her "happiness" to "enjoy." Against this side was her individual self, the "personal power of character," what she called "myself as a self." This aspect of her was unbounded by sex distinction and therefore had the capacity to be equal to that of a man. 

She met her first husband, the aspiring artist and poet Charles Walter Stetson, on January 12, 1882. Within 17 days of their first meeting, Stetson proposed, but Charlotte noted in her diary: "I have this day been asked the one great question in a womans [sic] life and have refused." Charlotte was already firm in her decision that her life's mission would be to improve the world. She warned her suitor in a letter (recorded in Endure: The Diaries of Charles Walter Stetson): "Let me tell you…that I am not the combining sort. I don't combine, and I don't want to. My nature is the polliest of polygons, whose unhappiness it is true depends on the contact of its many faces…but which keeps its own unchanging shape…my life is one of private aspiration and development, and of public service…I will give and give and give you of myself, but never give myself to you or any man. " 

Thus began the fraught, anxious courtship of Stetson and Charlotte: a courtship that was to last nearly two-and-a-half years. Charlotte was torn between her love for Stetson and her desire for marriage, family, and home; and the certainty that marriage and motherhood would leech her time and energy for pursuing her own work and ambitions. She explained her agony to Stetson:

  "There will be times when this frenzy for freedom boils up with force, which ungratified, would bring misery to myself and those around me; and there will be times when the woman's heart will wake and cry with heart-rending loneliness.

  Then shall I seek for you like a dream—the tired child that wakes and feels for its mother, and if I do not find you there is nothing but a great blackness and despair, a deep remorseful agony, the unending horror of feeling that I myself have thrust you from me and woven my own shroud…

  Now these things are before me: I give myself to you and honorably fulfil my duties at whatever cost: subduing my deep-rooted desires and crushing out this Doppelgänger of mine whenever it appears. In due time I should reach content I doubt not; and should only suffer at intervals. 

  And if the glorious sweetness of our love held its own in both of us should know joy enough to overweigh all pain.

  Or: I leave you, and strengthen myself at all points, subduing in turn fierce heartache when it rose. In due time I should reach content, I doubt not, and should only suffer at intervals. And if my promise of energy and power hold its own, my sense of duty and place fulfilled would counterbalance heartaches." 

Although Stetson never placed her under any ultimatum, throughout the courtship he did try to encourage the part of Charlotte who desired matrimony and domesticity, and to discourage the Doppelgänger:

"[Charlotte] had one of those spasms of wanting to make a name for herself in the world by doing good work: wanting to have people know her as Charlotte Perkins, not the wife of me. She drew back with her old time feeling of independence from the prospect of sinking herself in our community. God alone knows how the terrible mood came again to her, for one could scarce find a happier being than she has been for months, or one more desirous of making me happy and of having a home & husband, & children & undying love.…She had a wild theory about living in one place—a home of her 'own' and having me come and see her when the erotic tendency was at a maximum. Of course I would not do that: and I would not think much of a man who would do it. The sweetest of marriage is cooperation towards advancement: close communion at all times, and the founding of a hearth. I will accept nothing else." 

By the summer of 1983 (following a brief trial "separation" from Stetson in the spring), Charlotte made her choice: she would try to accommodate Stetson's view that "her work is to be done if done well and to purpose by getting into harmony with that 'woman' [inside her] instead of trying to murder it." Charlotte Perkins and Walter Stetson were married on 2nd May 1884, in Providence Rhode Island. This was a huge change in Charlotte's previously fiercely independent and career-oriented life: she now found her time sucked up by domestic chores, leaving little time for her creative work. She attempted some rebellions: a week after the wedding, she wrote in her diary, "I suggested he [Walter] pay me for my services; and he much dislikes the idea. I am grieved at offending him; mutual misery. Bed and cry." In her later work, The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), she would talk about, "the home which is so far from beautiful, so wearing to the nerves and dulling to the heart, the home life that means care and labour and disappointment, the quiet, unnoticed whirlpool that sucks down youth and beauty and enthusiasm, man's long labour and woman's longer love." The Yellow Wallpaper is in part Gilman’s fictitious interpretation of the guilt of a traditional woman who feels herself failing to fulfil her socially-dictated role as wife and mother, and how that internal struggle affects her mental health.