Back to the Attic

So, I return to the attic…perhaps it is where I am most at home. It is familiar, in a way, and there is a comfort here if only in the fact that it is real, someplace above the tiresome world of small talk and suburbia and the dreadful “Angel in the House” (see blog by the same name below).

At the dawn of the 20th Century,Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote, “Life is a verb.” Wow what a wonderful statement and how tragic if only we live in a world of nouns and adjectives. After all, the devil is in inactivity, paralysis is frost on the living before the great freeze. At least to burn means Something is happening….that is for another day, another rant.

Today is about Gilman and life as a verb. The Yellow Wallpaper is perhaps Gilman’s greatest work and her most ambitious, to say the least, in her cautionary tale of a life “unlived.” It is the story of a trapped woman’s disintegration into madness. In the short story, the character’s husband, a supposed well-meaning physician,  ”treats” her nervous disorder, diagnoses and controls her with tonics and pills. His cure is made up of  the patient doing nothing, certainly no more than an hour’s daily reading or writing or engaging talk. The fictional character does not have the resources to save herself.

And naturally there must exist the Angel in the House, the doctor’s sister, who is  “the perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession.” The consummate mother and housewife and the measuring stick for all of us. Was Gilman gunning for us all to go to the office and leave the kids at daycare, NO.

However, she did recognize that diagnosing ourselves and taking our daily dose of minutia and the revolving dish and mop is often not enough. We are more than hormones, depression, bipolar disorder, postpartum depression–those harrowing commercials at mid-day with the woman in her sweatshirt slumped and idle. This is not to say that such disorders do not exist–far from it–but we are more than the sum of  our pharmaceuticals, I think.

The “upper room”  in Gilman’s tale is joined by corridors throughout literature like Bertha’s attic in Jane Eyre; Cinderella’s tower (though she sold out and wore the tight-fitting shoe), Rapunzel’s prison where, of all things, she lets down her golden hair (highlighted or natural?); it is a vehicle for the doctor, a place where the patient’s lady in the wallpaper befriends her. Our prisoner begins to see patterns, moving shapes, creeping  in  her symbol of confinement. It is interesting that the woman in the wallpaper moves–the verb–while our patient is still, idle and resting. The woman becomes the thing that she looks forward to: “There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.” The women (she starts out as an individual then become the every-shifting “everyman”) change patterns, they come from behind the paper they begin to move fast and envelop the house.

“In the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through.”

So, ladies and gentlemen, be forewarned–”

Now, let’s all go write a blog. The attic in your home is beckoning you.

Along with Morrison and Walker, this is one of the best modern-day depictions of the relationships that we long for, we lose and we misunderstand. It’s the women in this novel–they are outstanding characters. One of my favorite quotes is from the narrator: Lily, the 14-year-old girl who feels she is “unlovable” until she meets the 3 women in the pink house and rediscovers a bond that she knew was always there but never understood with her deceased mother–Lily, as the narrator, says:

“Knowing can be a curse on a person’s life. I’d traded in a pack of lies for a pack of truth, and I didn’t know which one was heavier. Which one took the most strength to carry around?…once you know the truth, you can’t ever go back and pick up your suitcase of lies. Heavier or not, the truth is your now.”

And to that question that Lily asks as to whether it is better to know or not know the truth August replies:

“There is nothing perfect…There is only life.”

The movie is a fantastic depiction of a book with beautiful images and heart-breaking relationships and a search for something that is unnamed in all of us.

Tending the bees-harder than it looks