{"id":2209,"date":"2025-03-25T05:31:18","date_gmt":"2025-03-25T05:31:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/?p=2209"},"modified":"2025-03-25T05:31:54","modified_gmt":"2025-03-25T05:31:54","slug":"a-womans-place-on-the-color-wheel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/2025\/03\/25\/a-womans-place-on-the-color-wheel\/","title":{"rendered":"A Woman’s Place on the Color Wheel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Though Mona Caird\u2019s The Yellow Drawing-Room<\/em> is full of color metaphors, framing color around the nature motifs throughout reveal the societal shift from grey-blue to yellow or rather the Old Woman to the New Woman. Nature offers a framework to contextualize colors and expand the color metaphors to the natural world, which connects to the woman\u2019s place in both the private and public sphere or rather in the home and out in nature spheres.<\/p>\n

The narrator positions the yellow room around nature motifs as initial points of disagreement with the type of woman Vanora is. Comparing types of women to color and nature elements like the sun, the narrator sets the room \u201c\u2026in a flow of golden light; no ladylike antidote, however strong, could lead one to ignore it. It was radiant, bold, unapologetic, unabashed. It was not the room that my ideal woman would have created. My ideal woman would unfailingly choose a nice tone of grey-blue\u201d (Caird 1892, 104). The \u201cflow of golden light\u201d evokes both water and light imagery. The following ode to how \u201cun-ladylike\u201d these natural elements are separates women from the natural world, instead instructing a re-aligning to the narrator\u2019s version of an \u201cideal woman\u201d with \u201cgrey-blue\u201d hues. Perhaps, Caird suggests the ridiculousness of the narrator\u2019s obsession with associating light and color as a foundation to criticize a strong-headed woman.<\/p>\n

The stark contrast between \u201cyellow\u201d and \u201cgrey-blue\u201d offers a physical manifestation of the Old Woman transforming into the New Woman. That New Woman coding correlates yellow and radiance or \u201cgolden light\u201d to the sun and a change to the natural world. Though, yellow is \u201cunapologetic\u201d and abrupt in its change from the narrator\u2019s \u201cideal woman\u2019s\u201d choice of a \u201cgrey-blue\u201d room, it is simultaneously natural as it blends with the sun\u2019s light.<\/p>\n

Posing \u201cunapologetic\u201d women with nature disassociates the narrator and society\u2019s more \u201cidealistic\u201d definition for women\u2019s positioning in gender hierarchies. If not the natural world as it is too \u201cradiant\u201d and \u201cbold,\u201d Caird codes men to desire women with what the Victorian era considered more natural, intuitive responsibilities and to more respected \u201cgrey-blue\u201d rooms. The narrator disagrees with Vanora\u2019s choice of nature as it differs from the Victorian era\u2019s nature of gender structure positioning men in power over women.<\/p>\n

Nature\u2014sun and water\u2014plays a role in Vanora\u2019s womanhood, though, the narrator\u2019s ideas of feminine nature in societal terms strays away from the natural world and absorbs order from societal instruction as he says Vanora continues \u201cto think and act in disharmony with the feminine nature and genius\u201d (Caird 1892, 106). While the narrator implicates nature and the sun\u2019s rays, he also mentions the breaking from \u201cfeminine nature and genius.\u201d The varying uses of nature stresses how society used scientific and natural elements in the Victorian era to prove women had instinctual domestic responsibilities and to associate a woman attuned to nature as estranged from those traditional roles.<\/p>\n

Though, this gender structuring and difference in nature definitions advantaging men is contradicted when Caird also grants women slight mobility with the repeated mention of women having to \u201ccreate\u201d and \u201cchoose\u201d colors, which implicates women at the centers of creation stories. Geographically, Caird locates women in domestic narratives as they both create rooms and are confined to them. This mobilized and confined space relates to Charlotte Perkin\u2019s Gilman\u2019s The Yellow Wallpaper<\/em>, in which the female narrator, diagnosed with hysteria and given the “rest cure” by her doctor husband, gains agency in her confined space by becoming one with the moving wallpaper (Gilman). The yellow coloring in both texts implicate bold colors and illness narratives as symptomatic of women straying away from the boxed in \u201cfeminine nature and genius\u201d designed by men. Yellow draws attention to their misbehavior, painting targets on their backs and incentivizing a return to the traditional natural order even though there is anything but order at the end of The Yellow Drawing-Room<\/em> when the narrator causes chaos between the sisters.\"THE<\/p>\n

Image from the 2021 film rendition of The Yellow Wallpaper.<\/p>\n

Works Cited:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Caird, Mona. The Yellow Drawing-Room<\/em>. 1892.<\/p>\n

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper<\/em>. First Avenue Editions, A\u00a0 \u00a0 division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc., 2017.<\/p>\n

Image: https:\/\/www.filminquiry.com\/the-yellow-wallpaper-2021-review\/<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Though Mona Caird\u2019s The Yellow Drawing-Room is full of color metaphors, framing color around the nature motifs throughout reveal the societal shift from grey-blue to yellow or rather the Old Woman to the New Woman. Nature offers a framework to contextualize colors and expand the color metaphors to the natural world, which connects to the … Continue reading A Woman’s Place on the Color Wheel<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5109,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[135984],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5109"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}