This digital exhibit investigates how domestic and liminal spaces such as bedrooms, nurseries, and even abandoned mills, serve as arenas of psychological, temporal, and social confinements in The Yellow Wallpaper, The Story of an Hours, and The Ghost in the Mill as explored through the scholarly work of Berenji, Notaro, Phom, and Monisha & Pandey. Through images and interactive layouts that close more and more the further the user scrolls, the exhibit aims to immerse viewers in the enclosed spaces; hopefully making them feel the walls and the narrowing rooms of confinement.
Berenji’s “Time and Gender in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper' and Kate Chopin’s 'The Story of an Hour’” highlight how Chopin and Gilman manipulate time by compressing it to dramatize women’s oppression. In The Story of an Hour, Mallard’s transformation unfolds over the span of a single hour; the magazine page becomes a temporal container as the room becomes a physical container of Mallard’s emotions during the brief time—beyond which she can’t express her true self
This spatial reading is reinforced by Anna Notaro’s work on domesticity, which argues that rooms, furniture, and wallpaper are not passive but “the organization of space becomes a crucial factor in perpetuating status differences.” Furthermore, as Tenipumei Phom expands, confinement of the body often becomes confinement of the mind and the “rest cure’ which prescribed complete passivity, confinement” mirrors the shrinking of the narrator’s agency. Visually, this tension will be represented in the exhibition by layered wallpaper textures, scrolling sequences that gradually dive deeper in a dark space, and multimedia artifacts that close around the reader: a digital echo of the importance of space in the stories.
The Ghost in the Mill extends the theme of confinement beyond the personal into the communal. Stowe frames her ghost tale within an intimate room, where a family gathers indoors on a winter night. The mill becomes a second confined space loaded with memory and guilt. Juxtaposing the warm domestic hearth with the haunted mill visually and structurally will allow viewers to move between two types of spatial enclosure: the cozy yet restrictive interior, and the eerie, mill ruin. Incorporating the original 1872 publication as a primary source roots this experience historically, while period images encourage sensory immersion.
Across these stories, space works to confine and contain. Bedrooms, nurseries, and mills become sites where identity is shaped, or erased. This exhibit uses scroll-compression, layered wallpaper textures, shrinking and moving text to recreate that feeling of enclosure, asking the viewer to feel the confinement that these authors wrote about. Moving through the page is a movement through these spaces: bright rooms narrowing into darkness, stories tightening like walls. Through this exhibit, I hope viewers see how literature carved space for women’s voices despite constraint.
This illustration from The Yellow Wallpaper visualizes the narrator at a moment of tension between enforced stillness and interior chaos. Seated by the nursery window, she appears immobilized within a wooden chair, a domestic object that reinforces her physical confinement. The dense drawing compresses the space around her, echoing the psychological pressure that accumulates in the text as she is subjected to the "rest cure" prescribed. As Berenji argues, Gilman uses the compression of time and space to dramatize the narrator's dissolving autonomy; the illustration similarly traps her in a vignette where no movement is possible. As Phom puts it: "the pretext of a ‘rest cure’ symbolises the broader confinement that women experience within the four walls of their home in a patriarchal society" (Phom, 2025). The heavy shadows cast by the window bars appear almost like prison lines, superimposing structures of surveillance and control over the room.
In the exhibit, this image anchors the user’s first encounter with spatial enclosure. As the viewer scrolls and is forced to squeeze through the tight space of the prison-like window, the image becomes a visual statement about how domestic rooms themselves function as disciplinary architectures. Scholars such as Notaro note that nineteenth-century interiors were not neutral: their arrangement reinforced gendered hierarchies by limiting women’s access to public or creative space "reflecting the nineteenth-century constraints on women’s creativity and autonomy" (Notaro, 1999). Hatfield’s illustration, therefore, shows a woman literally and metaphorically contained by the space around her. The scrolling motion, which tightens the digital "room," mirrors the narrator’s unraveling as she becomes increasingly fused with the wallpaper’s oppressive patterns.
This nursery wallpaper offers a material counterpart to the wallpaper that is almost a protagonist to Gilman's story. Produced in 1893, the design features pastoral vignettes of children in seasonal activities: imagery meant to cultivate innocence, domestic harmony, and moral development within the Victorian home. Yet when placed in a repeating manner behind Hatfield's illustration, the wallpaper becomes unsettling. Its repetitive pattern mirrors the narrator's obsessive fixation on the wallpaper's "sickly sulphur tint," (Gilman) while its childish imagery juxtaposes the grim psychological situation unfolding in the nursery.
As Phom's work suggests, the nursery functions as a feminized, infantilizing space positioned to constrain the woman housed within it. It is "the pervasive impact of patriarchal confinement on a woman's body and min" (Phom, 2025). The wallpaper's order embodies the kind of behavioral regularity expected of middle class wives, and of which variation from often led to this kind of "rest cures".
Displaying this wallpaper as the exhibit's first background makes the wallpaper feel intrusive. The motion transforms it from historical artifact into metaphor. The viewer becomes protagonist in the discomfort the narrator lives through.
This period illustration from the Project Gutenberg edition of "The Ghost in the Mill" captures the moment when the "ghost" appears in the story. The figures stand in a smoky room with a collapsing mill which the user has to symbolically squeeze through. Unlike the domestic interiors of Gilman or Chopin, Stowe's mill is a space whose confinement emerges in the protagonists through memory and in the ghost through the literal confinement of the mill
Notaro's argument that spatial arrangements dictate social hierarchies resonates here: the mill becomes a stage where guilt and community entrap the characters more effectively than walls. Phom's observation that bodily confinement mirrors mental confinement (her "inseparable link between physical and psychological confinement" (Phom, 2025)") is equally visible: each figure appears tense, scared, or immobilized by dread.
In the exhibit, the illustration forces viewers to "enter" the chimney in the mill themselves. Coming from the previous images the viewer moves from domestic warmth to industrial darkness.
This historical map broadens the scope of spatial confinement in Stowe's story by situating the mill in the larger geography of Massachussets. While the mill scene feels very claustrophobic and isolate, the map reveals the region: its rivers, forests, roads, and small towns. Seeing how common rivers are make us understand how common these mills were: how much they were part of the collective unconscious as the "new age" in the mind of their contemporaries. This together with the importance of "chimney-corner storytelling" (Stowe) cements the story in the commonality of the New England/Massachussets life at the time.
This scan of the original 1894 Vogue printing of "The Dream of an Hour" (The Story of an Hour) presents the story in a narrow newspaper column which compresses Louise Mallard's emotional rollercoaster into a visual container. The formatting itself enacts the spatial constraints described in the story as the room that Mallard retreats herself to in order to show her true emotion. On the temporal side, as Berenji notes, Chopin manipulates the "hour" as an interval in which Mallard briefly imagines a self beyond marital and domestic boundaries: escaping the confinement of her condition.
The annotations and signs of wear on the printed page remind viewers that this story circulated within a social world that both consumed and expanded women's voices.
Kersting’s intimate interior scene becomes an evocative visual parallel to “The Story of an Hour,” though it predates Chopin’s work by several decades. The painting depicts a woman seated alone by a bright window, engaged in delicate needlework. The composition is serene, orderly, and contemplative—yet the stillness also suggests the domestic enclosure typical of nineteenth-century femininity. The room is geometrically perfect: clean lines, tall windows, and pale light create an atmosphere of quiet discipline. As Notaro argues, such interiors were designed to sculpt behavior, reinforcing expectations of feminine composure and inwardness.
In relation to Mallard’s story, this painting crystallizes the paradox of the liberating yet confining room. The window offers a glimpse of an expansive world, just as Mallard sees “blue sky” and “new spring life”; however, the woman remains seated, bounded by the demands of her role. The painting’s tranquility becomes a visual counterpoint to Mallard’s explosive interior revelation, emphasizing how moments of psychological awakening often occur within tightly structured domestic spaces.
Displayed alongside the original print of Chopin’s story, this artwork enriches the exhibit’s exploration of spatial symbolism. As the viewer scrolls into this section, the webpage temporarily brightens and widens—the only point in the exhibit where space expands—evoking Mallard’s breath of freedom. But the image’s symmetry and stillness quietly reassert the constraints that continue to shape women’s lives. The painting thus captures the beauty and burden of the room as both sanctuary and limitation.
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