This digital exhibit investigates how domestic and liminal spaces such as bedrooms, nurseries, and even abandoned mills, serve as sites of psychological, temporal, and social confinements in The Yellow Wallpaper, The Story of an Hour, 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'" highlights 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 (Berenji, 2013). In The Yellow Wallpaper, the nursery becomes a very literal prison for the narrator and is a symbol of her psychological deterioration.
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." (Notaro, 1999) 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 (Phom, 2025). 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: an 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 story of the mill becomes a second confined space loaded with memory and guilt. Juxtaposing the domestic rooms of the previous stories with the haunted mill visually and structurally will allow viewers to move between two types of spatial enclosure: the restrictive everyday interior, and the eerie, mill ruin. Incorporating the original 1872 publication as a primary source roots this experience historically, while period images encourage immersion.
Across these stories, space works to confine, contain, and confuse. Bedrooms, nurseries, and mills become sites where identity is shaped and erased. This exhibit uses scroll-compression, layered wallpaper textures, shrinking and moving text to recreate that feeling of enclosure and confusion, asking the viewer to feel the confinement and psychosis that these authors wrote about. Moving through the page is a movement through these spaces: squeezing through a window, up a chimney, or through newspaper pages. I hope the exhibit helps viewers see how these authors turned confined spaces into a means of exposing women's constraints and their efforts to push against them.
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This illustration from The Yellow Wallpaper visualizes the narrator at a moment of tension between stillness and eeriness. By the nursery window, she appears intelty writing while sat in a wooden chair, a domestic object that reinforces her physical confinement. The drawing compresses the space around her through the use of contrast, echoing the psychological pressure that the narrator 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 also 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 is 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 statement about how domestic rooms function as disciplinary mediums. 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 in 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 takes on a strange, uneasy quality. The repetitive pattern mirrors the narrator's obsessive fixation on the wallpaper's "sickly sulphur tint," (Gilman, 1892) 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 mind" (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 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 trap 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 of the mill themselves. This makes the viewer separate themself from the previous images of domestic warmth to industrial darkness.
This historical map contextualizes Stowe's story by situating the mill in the larger geography of colonial-era Massachusetts. While the mill scene feels very claustrophobic and isolated, the map reveals the region: its rivers, forests, roads, and small towns. Seeing how common rivers are in the area gives us an idea of how common these mills were. They were part of the collective unconscious and the "new age" in the mind of their contemporaries. This together with the importance of "chimney-corner storytelling" (Stowe, 1872) cements the story in the commonality of the New England/Massachusetts 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 enforces 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. Monisha and Pandey expand on this idea, arguing that both Chopin and Gilman portray women whose identities have been "subordinated and denied" by patriarchal society, leaving them to experience freedom only in rare, fragile moments (Monisha and Pandey, 2024). The narrow column of the magazine visually mirrors that constraint, offering Mallard a glimpse of individuality that is immediately threatened by the structures surrounding her.
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 interior scene shows the viewer a parallel to the environments described in "The Story of an Hour," even though it predates Chopin's work by several decades. The painting depicts a woman seated alone by a bright window, intently looking down and pondering. The composition is orderly and the stillness echoes the domestic ruliness typically expected of 19th century femininity. The room is perfect: clean lines, tall windows, and pale light create a quiet atmosphere: again echoing the behavior expected of Mallard when receiving the unfortunate news as a 19th century woman. As Notaro argues, such interiors were designed to sculpt behavior, reinforcing expectations of feminine composure and inwardness, as during that time, the "proper role of women or what was known as the "women's sphere." "True Womanhood," a concept very much debated at that time, included four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, submissiveness and, last but not least, domesticity." (Notaro, 1999).
In relation to Mallard's story, this painting frames 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" (Chopin, 1894). The woman however remains seated, bounded by the demands of her role. The room frees her of society's expectation, but is itself a jail since Mallard only reveals her identity once secure in it.
Displayed alongside the original print of Chopin's story, this artwork enriches the exhibit's exploration of the symbols of space. The viewer has to squeeze between these two artifacts: the private room and the newspaper. The compression becomes a metaphor for Mallard's situation: stuck between the quiet, disciplined interior represented by Kersting's room and the unforgiving public text fixed in the printed page.
Berenji, Fahimeh Q. “Time and Gender in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ and Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story of an Hour’.” Journal of History Culture and Art Research, vol. 2, no. 2, 2013, pp. 221–234. https://doi.org/10.7596/taksad.v2i2.231
Chopin, Kate. “The Dream of an Hour.” Vogue, 6 December 1894. Missouri Historical Society Collection, https://mohistory.org/collections/item/D00404. Accessed 10 December 2025.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. 1892. Project Gutenberg Edition, 1999. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1952
Hatfield, Joseph Henry. Illustration for “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” 1892. Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org.
Kersting, Georg Friedrich. Embroidery Woman by a Window (also known as Louise Seidler Embroidering). 1811. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Monisha, V., and P. S. Pandey. “Exploring Feminine Subjugation and Liberation: A Comparative Analysis of Gender Roles and Patriarchal Constraints in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and Kate Chopin’s ‘The Story of an Hour’.” Journal of Critical Studies in Language and Literature, vol. 5, no. 3, 2024, pp. 30–34. https://doi.org/10.46809/jcsll.v5i3.269
Notaro, Anna. “Space and Domesticity in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” Journal of American Studies of Turkey, no. 10, 1999, pp. 59–68.
Phom, Tenipumei. “A Room Not of Her Own: Confinement of the Female Body and Mind in Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’.” Research Journal of English Language and Literature, vol. 13, no. 3, 2025, pp. 459–463.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. “The Ghost in the Mill.” In Oldtown Fireside Stories, 1872. Project Gutenberg Edition, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22320/22320-h/22320-h.htm
“The Months” Nursery Wallpaper. Design by Kate Greenaway. Manufactured by David Walker, 1893. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Museum no. E.1823-1934.
“A New and Accurate Map of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, in North America, from a Late Survey.” 18th century. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
“Old Cack Knew Him Too.” Illustration for “The Ghost in the Mill.” Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org.