\u201cThe room was in a glow 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. Certain suspicions which I had harboured that Clara Haydon was my ideal woman grew stronger as I watched her quiet English face bent over the tea-tray. I liked the straightforward look of the girl, her blue eyes and fair complexion. If I was to give up my liberty, the reins should be handed over to a kind, sensible young woman like Clara, who would hate to make herself remarkable, or her drawing-room yellow.\u201d (Caird 104).
The narrator (presumably a man) describes the yellow drawing-room using the following description words: \u201cIt was radiant, bold, unapologetic, unabashed. It was not\u2026\u201d (Caird 104) Meaning, that the narrator does not use these noteworthy adjectives when illustrating his \u2018ideal woman\u2019 and his expectations for her, providing a stark contrast from a traditional \u2018ladylike\u2019 outlook. The yellow room represents a beak from conventional female autonomy, symbolizing the need for female autonomic independence, rights, and expression. The \u201cgrey-blue\u201d color that the narrator prefers, doesn\u2019t stand out or present the striking qualities in the analysis above. Therefore, the yellow room serves as a challenge to the norms of femininity in Victorian society.
The narrator\u2019s selection of \u201ca nice tone of grey-blue,\u201d (Caird 104) as the ideal color for a woman\u2019s drawing-room suggests his masculinized lens as to how a woman should behave in Victorian society. This is particularly relevant in the illustration of Clara Haydon, perceiving her as passive, submissive, and an idealized style of beauty. The keywords in the passage above connotate with the following claim: \u201cquiet English face, \u2026 straightforward look, and blue eyes and fair complexion.\u201d (Caird 104). Furthermore, this emphasizes the yellow room as a woman who does not rebel against constricting social and societal norms. With this description, Clara is perceived as an \u201cAngel in the house,\u201d (Victorian Web 2) and a limitation of women\u2019s independence and self-autonomy in the domestic sphere, marriage, and confining middle-class wives in the home. <\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cThe room was in a glow 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. Certain suspicions which I had harboured … Continue reading Angel In A Yellow Room<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5594,"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-2212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2025-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2212","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\/5594"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2212"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2212\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/victorianlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}