Yellow Wallpaper and A Room of One's Own

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf argues that if a woman wants to write fiction, she must have money and room of her own. She also claims that “Genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among laboring, uneducated, servile people.” (50) Since only when women don’t have to worry about any material circumstances like noise from outside, interrupt by other people, money needed to make a living, or even the health of family members, they can truly sit down and have peace to create and write. In her own rooms, a woman is released from all obligations held by the power of law and custom, she can do whatever she wants without any form of distraction and discouragement.

While in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, a woman with nervous depression was depicted. And I think this character can somehow support Wolf’s opinion. It seems that this woman in The Yellow Wallpaper is from a rich family since her husband John is a physician. She doesn’t need to make money or do any housework. All she has been asked for is taking a good rest and getting better at home. However, the room the woman has is not the “room of her own” as Wolf described. Because her room someplace “hideous, unreliable, infuriating and torturing” to her and always makes she feel dizzy and constrained due to its horrid yellow wallpaper. The woman even doesn’t have freedom to decorate her room in the way she preferred. Besides, John and his sister hate this woman to write. “John has cautioned me mot to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. (649)” Imagination is the base of fiction, if she is not allowed to use her fancies, it is impossible for her to create. Therefore, this woman has freedom physically, but was bound and restricted mentally. Since she doesn’t have her own room, she is getting dreadfully fretful and querulous and isn’t able to continue writing all the time. Hence Woolf’s main point is proved.