Episode 3: Home (Dis)Comforts

Home Discomforts Podcast: Transcript

I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin. It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.

The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long.
There comes John, and I must put this away, – he hates to have me write a word.

Ana: And that was excerpt from “The Yellow Wallpaper”. This was a short story written in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and published in The New England Magazine, in the US. This is a story that links to the topic of our of podcast today, which is going to be looking at the relationships between our homes, mental health, and gender, but also from one particular aspect which is wallpaper.

The Yellow Wallpaper

Ana: Ok, so to all those who are interested in the history of home interiors, you may know that the Museum is well known for its wallpapers. And for those who don’t well here’s a fact: we hold one of the finest collections of mass market wallpaper dating from the late-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.

Today, we’re looking at wallpaper and related domestic ‘stuff’ from a slightly different angle…and this is in relation to the discomforts in the home, we have lots of wallpapers in the collection, and this will be our starting point to discuss the psychological and affective dimensions of domestic spaces.

And with us today to unpick these issues are Nicky Lambert and Paula Chambers. So welcome Nicky and Paula.

Nicky and Paula:

Thank you very much for having us.
Hi, thanks, nice to be here.

Ana: And I’ll introduce Nicky and Paula.

Nicky is an Associate Professor at Middlesex University, where she is Director of Teaching and Learning for Mental Health and Social Work. She is a Specialist Practitioner with the NMC and a Senior Fellow with the Higher Educational Academy (HEA). She is also a co-director of the Centre for Coproduction in Mental Health and Social Care and she has teaching and research interests in women’s health, physical and mental health, co-production, social media and health education.

Paula is a practicing artist with a back catalogue of shows, including most recently Home Discomforts in 2018 at Die House (Bradford). She is currently Subject Leader of Fine Art Sculpture at Leeds Arts University, and she studied the MA in Feminist History, Theory, Criticism and Practice in the Visual Arts with Professor Griselda Pollock, which has profound and lasting impact in her academic thinking and practice. She is currently completing a practice-led PhD at Middlesex University with Alexandra Kokoli.

Now, to go back to The Yellow Wallpaper, this tells the story of an unnamed woman who, at the end of the 19th century, has been effectively confined to a room in a seasonal home, and she is suffering from depression, and she undergoes a “rest cure,” that involves strict bed rest. And she has been advised to do this by her doctor-husband. As the story evolves, the reader witnesses her gradual emotional and intellectual deterioration of the main character. Many feminists have seen Gilman – the author – as a proto-feminist writer, and also this story as an attack on the medical discourses that oppressed women in the nineteenth century, as is evidenced by the character’s imposed enclosure in the home to treat that depression.

And in the story, the wallpaper in the bedroom is the only source of visual stimulus for the character, but also the token of this kind of oppressive ‘domestic sphere’. The protagonist becomes increasingly obsessed with the pattern. As the story progresses, she starts to notice a woman behind bars, nestled behind the wallpaper, trapped. The wallpaper being this metaphor for confinement, I would like to start looking a objects from the collection here at MoDA that are related, these are wallpaper designs and samples (SD1541; SD4790A; SW60) of the same period as the story of the “The Yellow Wallpaper”. And they exemplify the kind of wallpapers that you would have found in middle class homes; they have very floral, stylised designs. I’ve chosen some that are in particularly in sort of yellow and orange colours. And I wanted to start to talking with both you, Nicky and Paula, about these wallpapers, and ask you what do these evoke for you?

Nicky: I think when I look at them, because they’re small samples you can be drawn to them and it’s only when you think of them as actually encompassing you, like they do in the story, they completely surround this person, you suddenly feel very differently about them when you think about them at scale.

And there’s something about wallpapers, they’re one of the things that give people very strong emotions, people hate wallpapers or they love them; and when you notice one that you don’t like, you really can’t stop looking at it no matter how much you hate it. But I think there’s something around, when you see something at scale, something that’s immersive, something that surrounds you, you can have quite a strong response to it.

The pictures that we’re looking at here they have a very strong yellow floral wallpapers remind me a lot of the 1970s wallpapers I grew up with. And I’m a bit of maximalist so I actually don’t mind them, but I also can remember being a little kid, looking at those big complicated papers, and letting them come in and out of focus, falling asleep, and I and well imagine the experience of the heroine, I think we’ll call her, in this story, how she starts to have an interaction with this wallpaper, and how it came to change the way that she was thinking…

Paula: Absolutely, I agree with Nicky that sort of that visual shift that can occur when you start focusing on one particular object, or one particular pattern, you know, the story is a little bit ambiguous in relation to the size of the room, the scale, how much of the furniture is in there, in my mind when I read it, I imagine something quite specific, I imagine quite a high ceilinged room, and that this wallpaper is all-encompassing.

I mean, I think these days, you know, looking at these wallpaper samples we have here, you know looking at these beautifully painted floral motifs in quite realistic colours, if you had that in your house in 2019 you would have this in one wall, it would be a statement wall, and yet, I’m imagining that the room that Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes in the book is in every room, floor to ceiling at about 10-foot high, and that must have been very overwhelming, especially if there was a lot of furniture in the room as well. We’re looking at something in front of us here that does feel quite naturalistic, and from an art tutor perspective you know, very well painted, but at the time, again, I can see how that might have taken other kind of connotations, at that point in history there is no kind of nostalgia for a rural idyll in the way that we think about it now.

But I think the effect would be the same, being trapped in a room that was wall-papered with a very oppressive pattern, and being in a state of mind that meant you were perceiving things that may or may not be there, you know, possibly it didn’t matter what wallpaper it was, although it makes for a very good story.

Haunting Domesticities

Ana: Well yes exactly, and if we could deepen in those issues of the haunting qualities of the wallpaper, it’s described as being dull, having a lurid orange, and these flamboyant forms. So it seems like formally there’s an important aspect to it. But more generally, this is a commentary on the domestic space, and how that’s acting upon the character. Could you both just comment a bit on the quality of the haunting and how you understand it in terms of the text, but also in terms of your own practice, especially Paula you explore issues around the uncanny and domestic spaces?

Paula: Yeah, I mean I think haunting is a very interesting concept on lots of interesting on lots of levels. You know, on a very physical level, haunting implies ghosts, but you know, ghosts are always domestic, ghosts don’t loiter around in fields, ghosts loiter about in houses, you know I’m very interested in Poltergeist phenomena, because Poltergeist phenomenon is an intrinsically domestic disruption. You know Poltergeist slam doors, move tables, smash plates. those kind of things.

But haunting as a metaphorical concept implies the overlapping of time, things from the past intrude in the present in a way that makes us feel a little bit uncomfortable, which is what the uncanny is, the uncanny is a sensation that things aren’t quite right.
When I’m talking to my students, I always used the example of, what if you went home one day and all of your furniture was a third smaller than it had been when you left, it would be same but it would be different, it’s the familiar made strange.

And there’s something about that idea that domestic objects from the past sort of intrude into the present and remind us of things that happened in the past, and I think this is really important for feminism in particular, but also for women’s embodied and physical experiences, is that we remember that what we’re experiencing now is not an isolated instance, that these things happened in the past, like the character in the yellow wallpaper, what she experienced is not something that is specific to that time.

Nicky: I can remember the first time I read the yellow wallpaper, I was probably 17 or 18, and it’s a story that stays with you, I think of all the billions of books I’ve read since then and all the things I’ve encountered, but I never forgot the yellow wallpaper, and I think a lot of that is to do with being haunted by an idea, and what I find really frightening is that loss of agency, and I think in the past, women were writing about it because they recognised them as an experience.

And what I think is interesting is that in today’s society is we have a name for experience, it’s not unusual for women to experience postnatal depression, but what she’s experiencing is coercive control, so there is a reason why it haunts the reader because you’re looking at an experience that’s unnameable at the time, and I think on one level she projects her fear onto the wallpaper.
Instead of saying my husband and my brother both of whom because they’re men and because they’re doctors, are controlling where I can go, they’re basically imprisoning her.

The dialogue she has, the way she has to express that is to actually look at a woman behind bars, because that’s what she is effectively, and I think the way that the book has this dialogue with wallpaper suddenly makes it something that we can all experience at the same time, so we’re all slightly looking in an unfocused way at the situation. We’re all focusing on the wallpaper, and the wallpaper isn’t the issue on one level, the issue is the fact that she is being victimised.

Ana: Yeah, she’s being immobilised, she’s also being infantilised, and I think this something we were talking about this infantilising of women. So is there something you can contribute in that sense, of maybe making that link of the Yellow Wallpaper in the late 19c, to seeing this today, and how it’s differently expressed or maybe similarly expressed.

Nicky: I think what I also really pick up thinking about the wallpaper itself, is I look at the wallpaper it’s described as this contaminative, kind of yellow, it gets on people, and it’s almost like the quality of the horribleness of the situation, so every time I’m trying to think of what’s happening to her, I’m being distracted and engaged by the materiality of this wallpaper. It seems to be linked with poisonness, and even the way that the woman behind the paper behind is being described as creeping, there’s this lack of ability to stand up, this lack of ability to take up space, this lack of ability to find a voice. Which I find really interesting.

And you were saying about infantilisation, and the things I think are really interesting, that she says, her husband talks to her in a baby voice, constantly, and she puts away things, like she puts away her writing, she doesn’t wants him to see it, and she knows that he’ll be cross with her if he sees it. So there’s lots of things about how that space affects how she behaves, and how she moves, and how she talks, and how she thinks. And that’s something that work really pulls on?

Paula: Yeah absolutely, you know I work with a range of domestic objects and materials that have what I think about as the overlooked and undervalued qualities of material culture, you know these are things that are sort of fairly trivial they were fairly low cost when they were first manufactured. And as a consequence they’ve been aligned to a femininity that is also being trivialised, and I’m sort of interested in that. I’m interested in the way in which objects may have embodied a specific experience, and in the case of my sculptural practice, embody a kind of femininity that has also been undervalued, because I think in reality you know women don’t feel inside the way they have been presented or perceived to feel.

And we were talking earlier about sort of social media platforms like Instagram, where girls are you know making funny pictures of themselves with rabbit ears or kitten noses or whatever. You know that sort of urge to infantilise yourself and femininity, and the way that that is I guess materialised through what I’m interested in through material culture of feminine domesticity, I’ve just recently bought a few sort of 1970s thermos flasks, and I’ve bought them because they come in a range of really nice colours and are all identical so sort of sculpturally they looked quite good lined up.

But these are things that people have thrown away, I bought them in second hand shops very cheaply, they are seen to have no sort of value and yet they’re hugely practical. The thermos flask when it was invented must have been revolutionary. And yet these are things that have not been valued. I think that sort of aligns with this notion of infantilisation; this sort of trivialisation of women’s experience which I think is what we’re talking about here as well in relation to the yellow wallpaper.

Classed Domesticities

Ana: Class seems to an important aspect dimension of this, and when you speak of trivialisation, is that also part of this. And we often, the text of the yellow wallpaper has been read as being an example of middle-class white consciousness, but I think maybe there is something to be explored a bit more in depth about that, both in terms of what the text does, but also how do we think about other women’s experiences across the class spectrum, do you have some thoughts on how class affects this experience of the domestic, and the ways in which it’s presented, and valued, or undervalued?

Paula: Yeah no absolutely and I think it’s something that until very recently has not really been written about, particularly from a feminist perspective, you know, there is, has always been this kind of assumption that domesticity or the problem with the domestic sphere and women’s relationship with the domestic is a white middle class, you know, either US, British or Western European issue.
But of course the situation is radically different, that’s only a very small percentage you know, the women who wrote about this in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I’m thinking about Anne Oakley and Betty Friedan, and women like that, were educated when they’d been to university, they were coming from a very specific point of view, but of course the vast majority of women in the world experience this very differently.

And to own your own home, or to, not even to own, but to be in possession of a space that is personally yours in some way or another, that you have sort of metaphorical ownership of, and are able to decorate or furnish in the way that you choose, has been quite a radical gesture.

From my own personal experience, my parents were pretty working class and they ended up in suburban North London. And this was huge move for them, to own a home, and to be part of a sort of aspirational lower middle class community and yet they didn’t really fit in they weren’t really part of that, and I think, again thinking about wallpaper and the manufacturing of wallpaper, and I’m wondering at what point wallpaper in your home became something that working class British people, at what point they could actually afford that. I don’t know at what point wallpaper became cheap enough that working class people could afford it. And I wonder whether at that point middle class people, wallpaper then, oh no, you mustn’t be buy that.

There’s a sort of huge difference in the way that domesticity has been marketed to us as classed.

Ana: But also you would say with implications of how femininity is also marketed?

Paula: Yes, absolutely, because again, although DIY is sort of presented as a sort of masculine occupation, and I don’t know you, adverts for things like B&Q have that kind of underlying narrative to them.

And I think that class and gender are tied in a way that may not necessarily be a reality, you know, it may be that that woman is coming from a very aspirational, you know, middle class family and yet if she goes to B&Q to buy curtain rails, somehow or other that is seen as sort of trivial, and a waste of time and, I don’t know.

This two things are tied I think, and I think it’s to do with value, in the same way that things like house work and care, there’s an implicit value to these things, that women’s activities, women’s interests, women’s labour, women’s spaces are less important than men’s.

Nicky: I think another thing when you think of the yellow wallpaper the reason the story still echoes is that it does have is that it has some element of universality as well.

You know, everybody understands what it’s like to be overlooked, disempowered, not heard, and also to doubt your own senses; we’ve all been in those situations. And there is something I think is articulated in this book through this metaphor, that I haven’t seen anywhere else, done as well, and I think it stands up after all this time.

Personal Experiences of Home

Ana: At this point, I wanted to know more about the personal connections that Paula and Nicky have to a sense of home, to creating a sense of home, dismantling it, and how one might associate or dissociate this idea of home with the idea of the domestic.

Nicky: When I grew up we moved a lot, my dad started off as a cab driver and lorry driver, and then went into middle management, so we moved up a little bit, not epically, but a bit through the classes. And I was growing up through the 80s, and that meant our home was really very much changed, and I think the way that my parents decorated their house is not the way I’d choose to decorate mine.

For me, when I’ve recreated a space that I could consider home, one it’s been very mobile, so I’ve lived in lots of different places, I’ve moved around a lot, so I don’t have a one place, I don’t have an attachment to locality or a particular thing…

But what I do have is a sense of my home being something which is very specific in terms of how I kind of regenerate. So, as a nurse, and as a teacher, as quite a sociable person, I love loads of people, so I’m out a lot. But what I do need to do, is to draw a boundary sometimes, so for me home is a space that is curated and created by me where I can replenish myself, where I can be at peace, I can be quiet, I can be still, and actually I’m a little bit unrecognisable in my home space, compared to the person I am when I’m lecturing, or when I’m in a meeting.

And one of the things about being a woman and being friendlyish is that people make all these other assumptions about you, that you’re always on tap, that you’re always available hat you’re always there to greet someone at the door with a hot cup of cocoa, and welcome them by the fireside. And I really have to disappoint people because that’s not me.

One of the things I would say in terms of health and wellbeing for women is that often home is not a safe space, so I think we can never make these assumptions about what other people’s homes and private spaces are like. You assume that what you experience is what everyone experiences.

I think that’s one of the things I love this collection is it shows you all the different ways people, all the different choices that they make. And that’s another gift that you get from literature – the ability to look through somebody’s eyes. And it’s such an important skill as a human being to be able to empathise and to be able to put yourself in different perspectives.

Paula: I live in a fairly, I actually live in a fairly small ground floor flat, I live on my own, like Nicky does, my son left home about 6 years ago now, and since then my home is very much the space that I live in, it’s very much become a studio.

So I’ve got this flat, it’s got two bedrooms, it’s got a living room, it’s got a kitchen, that’s quite a lot of space for a woman on her own, so I don’t actually need to wander around these rooms, all I need to do is sleep, and eat, and you know, read, and watch a bit of telly sometimes, so all the rest of the space can be used to make sculpture in, to store stuff in, these objects that I was talking about that I collect that then become sculpture in some form or another, you know, they have sort of live somewhere before they turn into sculpture so they live in my flat, and stuff accumulates.

I’m a very poor housekeeper, and possibly intentionally so, possibly as a feminist protest. I don’t do any cleaning, I don’t do any cooking, I’m not interested in any of that, and that’s fine, it’s a choice I’ve made. But there’s a consequence of that, and that’s partly to do the way that femininity is constructed, but is also foistered upon women, from a very early age.

But what that means is that this flat that I live in is a space that I also work in, is a space that has a very specific kind of aesthetic: it’s very cluttered, I have a huge amount of quite weird things.

It does mean that if people come around I’m slightly embarrassed about this space, although I feel perfectly at home and very comfortable, being there on my own, to then have that on view is uncomfortable for me. And it think that’s a sort of hangover from this idea that women need to sort of keep home and that is not what I do.

So there’s a lot of ambiguity and ambivalence, about being a feminist artist who intentionally wants to disrupt the sort of historical notion of what home might be and what domesticity might mean for women, and yet at the same time, feeling an ever present need to fulfil other people’s expectations.

Challenging Expectations

Ana: So thinking about expectations, we have these 4 four postcards from our collection. We can almost read them alongside the yellow wallpaper story in the way they present a moralistic tale about how women should conduct themselves in their lives and in their homes in the early 20th century. They’re from about 1910, and contain both images and texts that tell the story of a mother who, upon leaving her child at home, possibly to socialize one evening, comes back to the house to find out that the house has caught fire and her child died. So certainly there is a lesson here about how, as mother, and as a woman, you should be in the home, caring for your child, and that being in the public sphere is to disregard your motherly duties, as society prescribes. So I wanted to touch on this aspect with you, how these postcards crystallise certain codes of femininity and punish certain kinds of behavior?

Nicky: I think, what, I’m so taken from these postcards is, they remind me of one of those kind of morality tales, “Matilda who played with matches and was burnt to death”, and what I like is the lack of subtlety in this story, it’s genuinely just a horror story, it’s a domestic horror story in the same way that the yellow wallpaper is as well.

Even more fascinatingly, these postcards have been selected by somebody and sent to somebody, and one can only wonder, what message is being given to the recipient: I hear you’ve been going out lately, let me put a stop to that!

But as well, the last postcards says, this is what society requires, this is what society does, whereas in reality it’s not talking about society, it’s talking about one woman’s failing to do the one job apparently that she’s been put on earth to do.

So quite an extraordinary, I mean, who would make such a thing, who would choose such a thing, who would send such a thing. It really is quite something. It also makes me think of last time I was a on a bus, and some poor woman had a baby under her one arm and the baby was crying, and two people turned around and looked at her.

There was this idea that somehow this policing of woman’s behaviour, or this blaming, when they’re somehow, this person is supposed to be failing because their child moved, or made a noise? It just connects up over all these different time periods, we still have this expectation that you know, on the one hand you should be a really great mum, you should be a great hostess, you should be running a fantastic home, you should be doing all these different things, then if somebody goes out either to socialise as a human being or to work that’s a problem.

If they don’t it’s because they lack ambition, and you can help but wonder where are women supposed to belong in this space?

Are they supposed to be creating the domestic space which is a beautiful thing for the family to have, or not, or is that a trivial thing? And described as not working women, whereas they’re putting a full day’s shift in terms of cooking, cleaning, planning, organising.
None of this stuff happens by accident, and when you look at confused messages that women are getting still, about what they’re supposed to be doing, you go round in a circle, and then you pick up something like the yellow wallpaper and for me, it says stop, stop doing these things…these are not reasonable expectations, and that’s one of the things I really like about it, and it’s one of the things I love about your work, is it’s like a beacon, someone is thinking these things too…

Paula: Yeah no absolutely, and you know this comes back to this sort of notion, this haunted notion of domesticity, and of feminist thinking around femininity you know as well. Interestingly that these issues are still coming up, you know the postcards that we have in front of us you said Ana after from about 1910, you know here we are in 2019 over a hundred years later, and we’re still talking about the same things. I think it’s problematic that we’re still talking about the same things…that are possibly much more subtle that are policing femininity.

So I think it’s part of this subtle undermining of women, in relation to their embodiment, their sort of physical being in the world, but also in sort of behaviour, acceptable forms of behaviour, and this does come back to the way women inhabit the sort of domestic spaces that may or may not be home, and the way that erm, that they pick up what Mireille Laderman Ukeles, American artist from the 1970s called maintenance acts, this idea that, you know she wrote this fantastic thing where she described herself: I’m an artist, I’m a wife, I’m a mother, but not necessarily in that order. And then she went on and said that I will continue to do these things, but will present them as art. So that she did: she cooked, she cleaned, but she documented these things and presented them as art practice, you know, as a way of I guess making more visible, you know, the labour of women, the physical labour of women, the emotional labour of women, the maintaining that goes into everyday life.

Caring as Labour

Ana: The emotional labour and the caring role expected of women that Paula was just referring links to the work that nurses do, Nicky, so could talk about the gendered aspects in the nursing profession, as this if often associated with a duty of care?

Nicky: Obviously nursing has always been predominantly female, and the way nursing is imagined is quite extraordinary. I wouldn’t advise anyone to google nurse outfits on the internet.

But you’ll soon see it’s like a microcosm of womanhood: you have some people that are seen as the battle acts, you’ve got the Hattie Jacques, the Babs Windsor, the cutie sexy. You’ve got this expectation of nurturing, but also a real fight over nurse education suggesting that nurses are born, and that this is absolutely gendered discussion, so that nurses are born to care, so they don’t need to be educated, they don’t need degrees. And when you think of the complexity of nursing now, I can’t describe it, it’s managerial, it’s very much often nurse-led units, you’re doing a lot more technical work.

And you would never get on a bridge that was designed by someone who thought they’ have a go at it, so why you would accept care from someone who was giving it a go because they felt they were naturally gifted is beyond me. But there is something about this idea about caring is all heart and no head, and that’s not real. It’s not a safe way of practising, but it’s also very bizarre idea.

Another thing that I do is co-production which is making sure that the people receiving the services are as involved creating them as they are in receiving them. So one of the pieces of work is about sexual safety in in-patient settings, but also in communities settings as well. So thinking about the fact that under the Mental health act you can be confined to a space not of your choosing, when you haven’t committed a crime. So you’ve not done anything wrong, but because you’re seen as a risk to yourself or to somebody else, people can take you into a space where you don’t want to go to and they can keep you there. Which is kind of what’s happening in the yellow wallpaper.

But the problem has been in the past is that the same way we haven’t always kept domestic spaces safe, professional spaces also have had problems so we’ve had issues with people being grabbed, touched, hurt, sexually exploited inside those settings and it’s only even this decade that we’ve started to talk about it more openly, and it’s only this year that we’ve really started bringing very clear guidance on how to manage these issues, and make sure that they don’t happen, and when, if by chance they do happen, to make sure that we are giving the people the best care and treatment possible.

What happens in health is a picture of what happens in society, and I think it’s quite a useful thing to think about of how we create spaces to be safe that are supposed to be healing spaces, in the same way that we look at domestic spaces and how they impact on people.

Healing and Safe Spaces

Ana: Spaces that are safe makes me think also of spaces of comfort; we’ve talked about discomfort mostly in the yellow wallpaper but how do you, do you have some thoughts on comfort in the domestic space…

Nicky: For me to be comfortable in a space, in terms of a space of healing space, a space of recovery, I think you need some element choice over of it, you need to have some element of control over it, and it needs to have been designed with that purpose in mind.
So a lot of the stock of the NHS is old nightingale wards and what I mean by old nightingale wards is big tall, long corridors, lack of dignity sometimes, and it can be very hard for NHS trust to keep upgrading their space in the same way that housing shortages, and appropriate housing is an issue particularly with people with less money.

It’s the same issue I think writ large for NHS trusts, a lot of the central London trusts are shrinking their footprint, they are selling off their land for private ownership, and that’s made the shape and space of in-patient provision different. So it’s not just about making it comfortable, it’s about how class and money and politics also influence what can be seen as a very intimate space.

Paula: Thinking more widely, about people’s experiences, women’s experiences of what we might think of as sort of home space, on the train down to London I was reading the essay bell hooks wrote called “Homeplace (a site of resistance)” and she’s talking about home from the perspective of a black African American of a certain generation and how home, whatever home constituted however small that was, however sort of “poor” that might be, that actually it was the only space where this particular generation of women could feel safe, and could feel not necessarily physically safe, but could feel that they could be themselves, that they weren’t there out in the world being demeaned, or denigrated, or being treated like inferior citizens.

So again, there’s an ambivalence isn’t here around notions of home, about safety and about comfort, yes for some women this can be a space that is about choice and is about furnishing in a way that feels personal as extension of self, and yet at the same time this space can also trap women, trap women very physically, but also trap women psychologically in terms of they know what’s expected of them, I meant there’s always that classic thing isn’t here of women who are victims of domestic violence, why didn’t you just leave, well the reason that the don’t leave is because they are trapped psychologically within that space.

Home can be many things simultaneously, yeah…

Ana: I think it’s really interesting not just as a physical space but being a psychological space, and before you also spoke about the embodied experience of home? So is there more to be said about this embodied experience?

Paula: Yeah, no, absolutely , it’s something I’m very interested in my sculptural practice and also in the writing I’m doing for my PhD.
I’m really interested in the way that women or femininity, or femininity is something quite specific, it isn’t necessarily about women, it’s about presenting as feminine in the world whatever that might be.

I’ve written about girls in their bedrooms, I’m thinking about the kind of stuff that you encounter as a girl – and that may be that particular bedspread that you have, or the mirror, or the chair, or the wallpaper, this kind of relationship that girls have with material culture at a very formative point in their lives.

I’m interested in the way that we inhabit space in the way that we make pathways around furniture, that we position things in a way that makes them easy to hand, the most obvious example

being in the kitchen, that sort of classic triangle between cooker, fridge and sink or whatever it is that is meant to make cooking easier.But I think the same kind of physical relationships with the stuff of home are set up in every room. I recently redecorated my bathroom, and I realised that I’ve put, I don’t have a tiny magnifier mirror for putting make-up on, so every day when I go to work and I put make up in the morning, I move the magnifying mirror to somewhere else and then I put it back again, which seems ridiculous, why did I not put it there in the first place, but there’s this kind of embodied relationship with people, and the stuff of home. I always sit on the same place on my sofa even though it’s big enough for me to sit somewhere else.

All of things form I think us as people, but form us as women, if you’re a little girl somebody has just given me a whole set of child-size washing machines, which were toys, you know the way that femininity is taught as well to little girls.

Nicky: All the stuff you’re saying about the way young girls experience is constructed is so interesting isn’t it, cause you look at, one of my colleagues who is a dad and has a very active daughter, and it’s so much easier to buy sports gear for his son than for his daughter…because even the soles of the trainers on girls, it’s not the pinkness of it all, but they’re not really made to be athletic, to play football running around shoes, and there is something around the pushing girls into this pink hello kitty childlike less than position, and then demeaning it, so giving them the very specific idea of this is young girls teen music, this is what a girls bedroom looks like, this is what girls like, and then saying and it’s rubbish, and it’s less than, and it’s as good, it’s not tasteful, it’s not mature…
And then when somebody does reach for a mature aesthetic, saying, not that’s not very feminine. and it’s this feeling of being trapped all the time.

From the Yellow Wallpaper to Now

Ana: And just to end, I asked Nicky and Paula for their thoughts on what they’d like to change, going forward in relation to the wider themes of domesticity and the home as a psychological as well as a physical space, and how this has shifted since the time of the yellow wallpaper…

Nicky: Well, we’ve moved a long way from the yellow wallpaper, but let’s cycle back there, one of the things I always took away from the yellow wallpaper was the loss of voice for this woman, the fact that her sense of self was undermine, that her sense of reality was undermined, she was very much gaslit. And for me, what I would really like to see is a real change in the way that we hear women’s voices, and I’d love as well to ban the word shrill, no more shrill, no more moaning, cause only women ever seem to moan, men seem to make valid complaints.

So something about the language and the way that women’s voices, in their materiality, are heard. But also in terms of what women are talking about, being put more centre stage, so if you look at political debates, you often see that women’s concerns one, being labelled as women’s concerns when they’re making society be more fit to be habited by people, but also in terms, even more in detail and focus thinking about health systems, and when women and BAME communities report pain, they’re often undermedicated, when people come forward to talk about sexual assault they are often disbelieved, and that is absolutely the essence of what makes the yellow wallpaper frightening. And what makes a very important time for people to be owning their power, and saying this is not acceptable, and I think we do keep seeing it, it keeps coming into the news, and it keeps slipping through our fingers again…

So what I would really like the future to hold is so that no matter what your body is you are safe, to live there, your creative expression is heard, and your contribution to society whatever it is, is valued, accordingly. And that’s what I would like to see, I’d like to see more equality I think, it would be make the difference to healthcare, and it would make the difference to making society as a machine for living that we create every day, I would like to see us create something that is beautiful, that is just and that is fair.

And that always sound really utopian, and another thing is obviously Charlotte Perkin’s Gilman other book was about a female utopia, so if you’re loving The Yellow Wallpaper get onto Herland which is also fantastic, and all those things that are like it, because people before us have had these thoughts, we are not on our own, and people in the future will hopefully move us forward as well.

Paula: I agree with Nicky implicitly there. From the perspective of an artist, a feminist artist and an arts educator, you know, I would also like to see more parity with the numbers of students that we have coming through. At present on a Fine Art course, or on arts courses generally there is possibly a 70 to 80% female students but out in the world, out in exhibiting galleries, the kind of money that artworks are being sold for, the difference is huge, it’s possibly only 30% women to 70% men, so the statistics sort of shift once these young women leave institutions.

And that could be for a whole number of reasons, but I still think that that needs to be addressed.

I also think that the way we, the way that we engage needs to have more of a feminist focus to it, and I think again this touches on what you were saying Nicky. You know, I think we need to change the model of interaction, you know change the way that we are in the world, not women, not just women, not just about femininity, you know, everybody, and I think that comes partly from stopping seeing, you know, care is a woman’s issue, mental health is about…women deal with this, domesticity, children in the home, you know all these things are really intrinsic to us as a society in a wider kind of way, and we need to stop looking at these as just things about women.

But oddly, the only people that are talking about this and are going “hang on a minute, look, look!”, are women. And this is something I find in my sculptural practice, you know, I’m using the stuff of home to make a wider point, about the way that women are in their domestic spaces, and what that might mean, is that about safety, is that about danger, is that about violence, is that about self-protection. But this is something that isn’t just current, it’s historical as well, but in a way it would be nice to not be the case in 20, 30 years’ time, it would be fantastic if there, again it’s a bit utopian and far-fetched, suddenly there was no domestic violence in 30 years’ time, women were not killed by their intimate partners. And that this wasn’t see as a women’s issue, that was just an issue.
So yeah, I echo Nicky on a lot of these things, and a shift on the arts.

Ana: Let’s keep up the fight. (Paula: Absolutely!)

Thank you very much both Nicky and Paula for joining us in this conversation, and I hope you enjoyed it.

Nicky and Paula Thank you. Thank you.

Ana: That’s been quite a journey, from talking about the yellow wallpaper and domesticity in the 19th century to thinking about very pertinent issues of gender in our domestic spaces today, just goes to show how MoDA’s collections can take us in very fruitful directions.

That Feels Like Home is produced by the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture, MoDA, Middlesex University.

In other episodes, we will be talking about contemporary issues that emerge from MoDA’s collections, from the gentrification of London’s suburbs to the relationship between our homes, everyday things and memories.

You can follow MoDA on Instagram and twitter @MoDAMuseum and Facebook @MuseumofDomesticDesignandArchitecture.

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Credits

Sound editors: Rhys T. Mathews, Martin Baxter.

Say It Again, I’m Listening by Daniel Birch is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial License
Let that Sink In by Lee Rosevere is licensed under Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0)
Would You Change the World by Min-Y-Llan is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.
Phase 5 by Xylo-Ziko is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.

Further Reading

Friedan, B. (1971) The feminine mystique. London: Victor Gollancz.

Gilman, C. P. (1998) The yellow wallpaper. Edited by D. M. Bauer. Boston: Bedford Books (Bedford cultural editions).

Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1952

hooks,  bell (2015) Yearning : race, gender, and cultural politics. New York, New York ; Routledge (Psychology Revivals).

https://www.paulachambers.co.uk/

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jan/05/even-dust-can-be-interesting-clare-gallagher-photographs-housework