A Space of Your Own

I can't say that after these recent readings I have anything profound to say or add to what has already been said. I had wanted to focus on the idea of space as we have seen thus far. In Move In, Move Out, Move On and our first set of readings all the authors seemed to be struggling in a way with their space. They recently moved in with their boyfriends or are failing at divvying up and allocating responsibilities for within their new spaces. Ursula Le Guin in her The Fisherwoman's Daughter asks for us to consider where a woman is allowed to sit and write, what a woman writing looks like. 

In thinking about Le Guin's challenge I too came up with Jo from Little Women. I picture in my head a woman hunched over a writing desk at night with a lamp focused on her paper as she scribbles away. What dawned on me as I continued to read through Le Guin's essay was that my mother is a woman writer. Why is it that I didn't immediately think of her? She never wrote in the darkness of night, in the solitude of night, she always wrote midday basking in the sunlight. Le Guin noted that for a woman to compose her writings in the middle of the house as Harriet Beecher Stowe did was absurd. We discussed in class a couple of reasons why: 1) there is no space for the woman to call her own and therefore no way for her to create something truly her own. 2) there is no quiet so how can a woman work in peace. 3) for a woman not to have a space of her own means that she also has no time of her own, and therefore cannot compose for a consistent amount of time. 

What I realized is that my mother never worked in solitude. She did have a designated space but she always wanted to be aware of the goings on of the house and therefore set up her office in the middle of it all. In our old house it in the living room and in our current house it is next to the kitchen. I think that her constantly being in the center of all the action inspired her as it inspires me. People are motivation and inspiration and to lock oneself away is, I think, foolish. 

Now to The Yellow Wallpaper and The Mother Knot. The woman in the The Yellow Wallpaper clearly has been affected by her solitude in the same room. She looks for solace in a world outside of her own, in the world of the yellow wallpaper. She becomes obsessed with the space in which she is trapped to cope and in the end becomes part of it. Much like the women in The Mother Knot she does attempts to break out of her prison or in the least change it. She says "I've got out at last, in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" Similarly in Lazarre's excerpt the main character equates her situation with a prison. She calls it "the wall which had kept me alone, the prison cell, the solitary confinement..." It is in this moment of realization that all confines are released and the women no longer remain trapped. They free themselves from their solitary lives to change them for the better. 

I do not wish to presume with this (seemingly longwinded) post, that to be alone is to be insane or depressed. But it just seems to me that an ongoing theme throughout each reading is this idea of space. Can space be shared? Is having too much space bad? Is having to little space bad? What happens when spacial concerns are violated? These are the sorts of questions that I think each reading has, in its own way, attempted to answer.