people have been telling me about this for years- but i only just got round to reading it last night. it was well worth it.
the actual pattern of the wallpaper, though never specifically described, is a major component of the piece.
".....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 repelllent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. "
"There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.
I get positively angry with the impertinence of it and the everlastingness. Up and down and sideways they crawl, and those absurd, unblinking eyes are everywhere. "
"everlastingness"....this is although she claims to be unable to see a repeat in it. the point of wallpaper is to create a seamless surface, to cover heterogenous materials. the repetition is eternal.
the pattern takes over to such an extent that the narrator finally becomes part of the wall, or physically sticks as close to it as is possible, circling the room as the "creeping woman" (a figure she saw in the design, or behind it) that she thinks she has either freed from the pattern, or has become. she identifies herself with a component of that pattern.
the pattern is likely to be a style that is still with us, i'm imagining it as a rococo, as a sort of trellis, composed of S curves and C scrolls, that climbs and spreads, with garlands, and containing in it's interstices vignettes of some sort of pastoral. we all will have seen or lived with some of this. i can think of two examples that i have endured in long-gone bedsits.
this style has variously been called rococo, chinoiserie, grotesque and arabesque. the last two terms have been conflated to a large extent. grotesque is more appropriate for the design if it contained people, animals and architecture, promiscuously mixed and mixing. the arabesque would properly refer to a sinuous decoration that might contain stylised flowers, but is predominantly non-representational. chinoiserie uses a decorative language, partly inspired by chinese ceramics and papers to describe western fantasies of the "mysterious east". it mixes trellises with ruins and pagodas, flowers and animals. http://shop.store.yahoo.com/wellappointedhouse/brinbedtrwih.html it is still with us. i couldn't find any good detail pictures, but one of my favourite buildings http://www.royalpavilion.org.uk/ is packed with it.
http://www.adelphipaperhangings.com/index.html#anchor%20home%20center just found this. a history of wallpaper in america, with loads of pictures. brilliant.
the grotesque got a pretty bad press in the C19, and before that, since the time of it's use in ancient roman interior decoration, as pointed out in this, http://www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/p1974203.htm a fascinating essay on Edgar Alan Poe's use of the grotesque by Patricia C. Smith.
"Many nineteenth-century critics echo the classical disapproval and are disturbed or offended by a style depicting disparate objects, some of them hybrids in themselves and blending, entwining them into an uneasy unity. The writer of the "Arabesque" article in Rees' Cyclopedia says that "The best architects" should "treat with contempt the bad taste of those artists who are profuse of these chimerical and imaginary ornaments . . . instead of preferring the real and beautiful productions of nature"; and the Encyclopaedia Americana entry on "Grotesque" (1839) says that what grotesque-makers fashion is "monstrous and unnatural," "the offspring of an unrestrained imagination.'...... many felt that the arabesque or grotesque maker is "vividly accessible to the influence of imagination" and "little under the dominion of sober reason," and that his apparent lack of selectivity and rejection of what is natural are, at best, in bad taste, at worst, a sign of wild-eyed lunacy. " patricia c. smith
apparently, ruskin wasn't too keen either, or pugin. i think that the word promiscuous best describes the offensive nature of the style. it pairs vegetable with animal, the built with the natural, human with decoration. it refuses to describe a stable space, and messes around with pictorial (and genre?) hierarchies: figure and ground, image and frame, narrative and ornament. the criticisms assume that these hierarchies are "natural", and reasonable.
it could be that in the case of wall decoration, using the heterogenous (though subordinated to pattern, repetition) to cover fractured and various surfaces was an apotropaic gesture. disorder and the lush play of fantasy (which eats the narrator finally in the "yellow wallpaper") could be allowed in thus far, and no further. or it could be that the leisure activity of daydreaming, staring at walls was being catered for.
all this is inspired by my reading of "painters and public life in C18 paris" by thomas e crow, from a bit of a dry start, it has gone on to a brilliant description of the development of the work of watteau ( http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/watteau/ ),
i have no idea if the picture below is in any way appropriate to the point, but i put it in because i like it so much.
this is a strange picture. he looks straight out, over our heads. with his arms limp, and the pink bows on his shoes. i would assume that he's on stage, but just standing. (there is some distortion going on, if you compare the size of his feet to that of his head, obviously we are looking up at him foreshortened.) his fellow cast members are on our level, but with the exception of the doctor on the left, no one is meeting our eye. his fellow actors might be waiting for their cue, but they don't seem too bothered. the foreshortening of gilles and the straightforward view of the other thesps, plus the disparity in their heights tends to leave the principal figure in his own, seperate, space. can't really see, but i suspect that the herm on the right has his cock out. the trees and sky are beautiful and feathery, something might be about to happen - then again, maybe not.
so, anyway, in crow's version, it all goes back to the commedia del'arte. this was an improvised theatre form that used masks and acrobatics, and formulaic plots involving cuckolds and naughty servants. being improvised, it could change and incorporate contemporary references. the commedia fell out of favour in C18 france for incorporating satirical references to political figures in the plays, so they were banned. at about the time that they were banned, they started appearing in the visual arts - the aristocracy had a taste for it, as well as the wider population. the crown preferred the tragedy, where there were only kings queens and princes as protagonists. the official theatre, was the comedie francaise. the commedia, being forbidden to perform plays with dialogue, joined companies of acrobats and performed slapstick routines as clowns. they also found ways around the prohibitions; for example, the actors would come on the stage one at a time to deliver their lines, (is this what gilles is doing in the picture?) or the dialogue would be written on boards, and the audience encouraged to speak it instead. these would all be versions of plays performed by the comedie francaise - so they were taking the piss.
"Even more deflating was classical tragedy presented en jargon: the players would appear in the costume of the best-known legitimate actors in their signature roles and speak their parts in perfect alexandrines: their lines, however, would be composed entirely of ridiculous-sounding nonsense syllables." crow, page 51
the thing that was constantly mentioned in contemporary accounts of this theatre, both approving and otherwise, was that it mixed genres, both high and low culture, and in its audience, classes. this imbibed by watteu in his first apprenticeship with a painter, gillot, who made boards for the plays, wrote scripts on occasion, and ran a marrionette show for a while (another way of avoiding censorship on the theater). his business also included making images of characters from the italian comedy, stock types, recognisable by their costume and masks. watteau left there, and worked for claude audran, a better class of painter, whose uncle was an academician, and who worked on the design of aristocratic interiors. audrans selling point was his revival of the grotesque, which he called arabesque. this is how crow describes it:
"...the motifs in his arabesques come most often from the lower, bodily-oriented segment of the classical repetoire: heads of bacchus, sileni, dolphins as messengers of love....there are mythical beasts of mixed, transformative character such as tritons, chimeras and sphinxes. among earthly animals, the most common are monkeys, which will often occupy a lower register parallel to the human figures above, imitating and mocking their serious activities...." crow, page 59
this was an art that used hierarchies, or pictured them, in order to mock. the framework of the grotesque, or the rococo (when covered with flowers), is the trellis; a pseudo-architectural construct, with floors, arches and columns, but the whole is too unresolved, too improbable, and too light, to create a coherent space. but still, it didn't observe propriety and simply cordon off an area for the real, or coherent stuff to happen. its interstices played host to other entities that might have something to say about the main event.
this is a mild version (it has no real symbolic or satirical resonance- roman matron/goddess, and big flowers), it's from the adelphi paper website (link somewhere above). it's from 1790-1810, according to that. what this shows is the the delicacy, and improbability, of the "architectural" framework of the grotesque. there are columns no wider than a hair, with gigantic flowers. the structure makes no attempt at a coherent space, it just partitions. the goddess competes for attention with the flowers. the urns with the swags. i must say, i love it. there is something brutal about the illogicality, the subordination of all the forms to a decorative(?) scheme. the framework could be said to fragment as much as unify. the "yellow wallpaper" had nodes, as described, the "eyes"; areas of greater intensity. still, the narrator could look beyond these to the creeping woman- or the woman was a collection of nodes, like a stellar constellation.
watteau did all this sort of stuff, too, as engravings. he used allegorical monkeys, frames, garlands. then, according to crow, he started to
"....to project the disjunctive strategies of the arabesque into an apparently unified moment in space and time." crow, p62
that is to say, he started making pictures, as we would know them, rather than decoration. personally, i would say that the portrait of gilles only just manages to hold together a unified appearance of space, and its time is uncertain- but that is its intention, and its brilliance, i think. but his pictures retained vital elements of his earlier work; the framing of the action (or inaction) by stylised vegetation, the commentary given by non-human elements, that have equal weight - for example, the herm in the gilles portrait, the indeterminate space, or time. this is what stopped them from being "mere" genre pictures. the theatricality also comes from the fact that these were not portrayals of the actual actors of the commedia, these were pictures of the nobility, who inspired by those improvised shows, staged their own. in their "fundamental removal from the here-and-now...they posit theatrical disguise as a condition of leisure and therefore of nobility." (crow page 64)
this nobility-as-style, rather than as natural law, or weighty responsibility, such as official "serious" art can give, cannot have helped them in the approaching revolution. to give genres the distinction of a force of nature is a sensible precaution. when nobility presents itself as just another genre it can run into trouble. the state style of revolutionary france was epitomised by david and his didactic history painting - clear space, solid architecture.
crow has called these fractured and timeless (in the sense of having indeterminate time, or action) pieces of watteau "allegories of desire". perhaps that is one of the defining features of the grotesque - the creation of a plane across which to chase desire, as embodied by visual sensation. the sensation of following a curve, to be stopped dead by mammoth flowers
"....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.." gilman - "the yellow wallpaper"
or the sensation of losing oneself in a pattern, like the narrator in gilman's work. one reading is that the wallpaper and its encouragement to idly dream and become enveloped in the sensual, visual pleasure of watching its development - and it does become more complicated the more that she looks at it- ultimately devours her. in this case desire is not necessarily a force to integrate, quite the opposite. the trellis creates homes for things that might turn on us, if pursued.
