Anxiety of Influence Photograph

Anxiety of Influence ‘‘…So many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all came out of that wall-paper as I did?’’ (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892) This piece of work concentrates on ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892. A chilling story of its time and even till this day. It is based on Gilman’s own life experience being a wife and a mother in the Victorian era, giving us as the reader an insight into the world of the women within this time, she too has penetrated her own emotional experience to reach out to her readers. In reality Gilman committed suicide august 17th 1935 having a difficult existence and endurance of mental pain. Within the story the women is diagnosed as having a nervous disposition and is told to ‘rest’ and ‘gain her health’ leaving her bed bound within a room at the top of the house (often the lowest prestige within Victorian household). Patronized and mentally manipulated by her husband who is the doctor who has diagnosed her, She slowly begins to loose her mind; starring at the wallpaper day in and day out, with out mental stimulation she begins to deteriorate. "It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw — not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things’’ (pg 28). Within time she begins to imagine that women are trapped within the ‘sickening’ yellow wallpaper, which has become as a mirror image of her self. ‘’As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her’’ (pg 32). Within my work I have incorporated a 60inch long wig that I wore through out most of my images. It is to represent the need for escape if we think in terms of Rapunzel using her hair as a ladder to freedom.