Whenever I see wallpaper, I think of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story, The Yellow Wallpaper. I must have been in high school when I first read about the nameless woman whose patronizing doctor-husband confines her to an attic nursery as a cure for her postpartum depression, even though she’s desperate for distraction and hates the oppressive paper, “one of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.” There’s nothing for her to do but study the wallpaper and in its design she sees fungus, bloated faces, an endless parade of mushrooming forms, the bars of a cage and, as she slips into psychosis, she imagines women creeping around behind those bars and rattling them, trying to escape. The Yellow Wallpaper is stuck fast in my imagination and when I read it again after I’d had kids and my own bout of postpartum despair, I perceived a whole new dimension.
I still see her running manic circles around her room, scrambling and scratching for a way out. Sometimes, when I’m slipping into some old rabbit hole of a thought, standing on that worn spot on the floor in front of the sink washing a dish I’ve washed countless times before, I close my eyes and remember that woman creeping around and around in fast-forward, eyes swallowed in black and her left shoulder stained yellow from rubbing against the wall, and I step away from the sink.
Some stories are all about the setting. Some construct settings designed to evoke specific ideas. I’m thinking of Gatsby’s house on West Egg, the mental hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the remote cabin in Bennett Sim’s House-Sitting, Ruth’s place in Housekeeping, 124 Bluestone Road in Beloved, Tara, Hogwarts, Downton Abbey: these are wondrous sites, solid virtual structures built to house specific moods and without them, each plot would have flopped.
In fiction, the setting is built for the plot and characters settle into hollowed-out spots custom-designed to fit them. No matter how hard they rattle the cage, they will fulfill the life the writer has designed for them: that makes good writing. In life, setting is just as important for plot but the process of finding our place is serendipitous. I have lived many places: some fit like a cashmere sweater and others gave me a wedgie but in each place, I have felt the push-pull of spatial influence, the way a structure exerts an influence on the inhabitant and how function follows form
Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “every spirit makes its house, and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the inhabitant,” and I would add that houses make spirits too. If a character grew up in Gatsby’s mansion, she certainly would look and think and act differently than if she were raised at Grey Gardens. Would she have a mean backhand, would her loafers match her belt, and, with one sniff, could she determine the denomination of a bill? Would she eat cat food from the can, wear a pantyhose sarong, and hang a lightbulb in a birdcage over a mattress on the floor? If the character was me, either of those settings might make me happy or miserable. Who knows what I’d be like but in any case, I would not be the person I now refer to as “me.”
I’d love to meet the characters formed by those settings, but I can’t be them. I’ve visited many places I would not choose to live, structures built in inhospitable places–on the sides of cliffs or on land so flat there’s not even a hill or a tree to break the monotony, in the blistering heat, in air conditioning, or in the cold acidic shadows of redwood trees, overlooking a noisy highway, in a crowded tract of identical houses, in a slum. It’s too late for me to have been born in Las Vegas or Dallas or Salt Lake City or even Paris. I don’t want to live there but I’d like to visit but after awhile, I feel a bit like the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper– warped by the wrongness of my surroundings, languishing a little until I can get back home, because as Eudora Welty said, “Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else…. Fiction depends for its life on place.”
I suppose one’s mother is always the first place one lived. In 1966 when my mother was pregnant with me, my parents lived in an apartment on Jones Street in San Francisco. She had her MFA by then and although the apartment had no room for a studio, she arranged to use an airless, windowless space in the basement to paint in, more like a closet than a room. I can almost smell the fumes from the oil paints when I imagine her standing there under a florescent bulb at the easel, holding a paintbrush in one hand and a cigarette in the other, her burgeoning midsection dabbling against the canvas. She quit smoking ten years ago but still, when I smell a cigarette, I remember her and the claustrophobic smoke that crept in my nostrils and clung to my hair. I remember nothing about our apartment on Jones Street and have only a vague impression of very steep streets, or more precisely, of being pushed up a nearly vertical incline in a stroller.
We soon moved to a more kid-friendly spot in the suburbs: 11 Lincoln Avenue in Mill Valley. Our little white colonial had bright red wall-to-wall shag carpeting and a cherry tree in the back yard. My toe-headed, wild-eyed brother was born and as soon as he could walk, he was running with scissors. My father built a fort in the back yard. I remember Kodachrome Easter hunts on the bright green lawn with all the boys dressed in pastel seersucker and the girls in eyelet dresses.
I wonder: if we had stayed at the Lincoln Avenue house, would my parents’ marriage have lasted? Could I have grown up to be a clean-cut girl in a pretty dress? Probably not, but still I wonder.
(…to be continued…)
Please, please tell me about where you live. What kind of setting shaped you?
girl in the hat 
I remember that story too - I never remembered the name or the details but i remember being horrified at it. it was a really powerful story. one of the best “ghost” stories (as it was pitched) that i read
SO GOOOD! You should really go read it again. *goosebumps*
i’ll need to look for it. i love a good ghost story. i’m just reading henry james ghost stories - the first one was not so good but lets see. Little Stranger by Sarah Waters was good. I had chills.
http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html xoox
thank you! just got back from hols - ah nice to have unlimited internet.
I found this photo online based on it:
i think its rather perfect http://dawnschuck.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/the-yellow-wallpaper-no-21.jpg
Oooo. Yes. The shreds. Exactly!
i’d like a hotel room done up like this
Reading your stuff again over lunch at another LA Taco joint. Trying to form thoughts through the impossibly loud Mariachi din and the standing wave of confusion set up in my tiny male lizard brain by the impossibly overweight yet impossibly pretty waitress. Yes, you and Ralph are so right, place influences so much. It’s as if… … eeegads.. somone just reloaded the jukebox! Can’t think… breaking up… aaaaghh, bailing out now…
.
Give that waitress an extra big tip, won’t you? xo
A rash and a wedgie! Yep.
Aside from my delight at that little phrase, what a good post!
Have you heard that we are moving to a new house? Interesting, huh?
miss you. love, k
Really? Yaaay! Hearty congrats, Kathleen. You will have to tell me if the new house changes you. xoox!
I live in Australia.
There’s something about this land, that if you take off your shoes, let yourself come into contact with it, and just be, it makes you Aboriginal. It is power, and beauty, and impossible to completely explain. But it’s here.
People miss out on so much, just by leaving their shoes on.
I can’t believe I went to Australia and didn’t take off my shoes. No one told me! I’ll have to try again. (I have a neighbor who eschewed shoes about 5 years ago. He says the same thing about feeling connected to place….)
Hello fellow Australian - I have to wholeheartedly agree with you about our land (although I don’t take my shoes off nearly enough). The first place I remember living in was a shed on 51 acres of bushland in Tasmania. That place still haunts my dreams - the sighing of the wind in the Eucalyptus trees. It gets in your blood and makes you perceive things differently. Anna, love how you explore these themes and turn them on the head… “houses make spirits, too”. Yes. This.
I come from Vegas. Gritty neon bulbs, vacant-eyed gamblers, sprawling subdivisions with all the houses in beige, lined up under a featureless sky for as far as the eye can see.
But one of those houses (olive green, because this was back in the day) was our family home, and our cul-de-sac was crawling with kids, and we’d run around on the blacktop all summer long and come home exhausted, blistered top and bottom, and we were happy. I guess we didn’t know any better.
I guess it’s all what you’re used to, Averil. I’m afraid it’s too late for me to be Las Vegas, but I do like to visit.
I’ve lived in places rural, urban, and suburban (unfortunately). Not that this is in itself remarkable but the rather contingent matter of personhood-shaping has always been a tricky one for me, fairly equally across all three. While I can still feel the senses and memories of these settings in any given piece of my present, I often find myself quite detached from them, to the point that I have what will amount to a healthy aversion to revisiting them in any meaningful way, particularly physically. Maybe that means I just haven’t found the right balance of push-pull, haven’t stumbled upon or into the right set of spatial influences. Makes me wonder how different I might be had I been surrounded at some point by something that truly fit (presuming for the moment that such places exist for each of us).
I agree– the process of finding a place is awkward and puzzling. I have lived in many places that didn’t fit right and after awhile, I found that they had warped me a bit. I just read your “Falling Out” piece and enjoyed it immensely. The house is like the relationship. Exaclly!
Yes, a bit of warping is precisely what those misfit places do. As in the case of the experience I described in my piece (so glad you enjoyed it-thank you), some places are perfectly fit for the warping that occurs while we inhabit them.
And by the way, lovely piece. I was so interested in commenting that I forgot to say so.
It’s interesting how many writers have lived in many places (I’ve lived in about a dozen). As Richard Russo says, a writer needs to move away from a place to gain a perspective of it and be able to write about it. That happened to me when I moved from SoCal. I can’t wait until I move away from Detroit.
Ha. If I’d ever visited Detroit, I’d insert some equally dry statement here about it.
But I’d love to visit. Detroit has a strong, unique personality in my mind.
I’ve never heard of that book and now I need to read it.
Setting is so vital. My favorite stories are those where the setting is so real and alive it becomes a character in its own right. Elly Griffith’s books are fantastic for that, in particular ‘The Crossing Places’. I’m reading a book right now with no setting. I know which state it’s in, but there is minimal description. It leaves me floating, with no anchor, in the book. I don’t like it.
Lisa- It’s a short story- it only takes a moment. Here: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html I remember you talking about The Crossing Places before. I’ll have to add it to my pile.
Great piece x 2 which I had to read several times and mull them over. As kids we moved around (a lot) but one of my strongest memories is not the house but the surrounds. We lived on an island, only accessible by a ferry. Between the ages of three and six I was allowed to roam around that island at will, I left the house in the morning, stuffed my shoes (and this is Australia) and jumper under a bush and was gone for the day. I can remember clearly the beach, the mangroves, the interiors of the island - but the house is a blank. I would return home at dusk - after magical days. I think lots of children who grew up in the sixties had this sort of freedom - something sadly lacking from my own children’s life. Place and circumstance impact on our lives in so many untold ways.
My god, I just got goosebumps reading this. I wish I could have visited you. That sounds like kid heaven. That sounds like an over-the-top fantasy. (My kids don’t have this either. I wonder what is the result of never being alone in nature? We’ll see, won’t we.)
It was kid-heaven and I know just how lucky I was 🙂