SUFFOCATION IN ISOLATION

To isolate someone is to cause a person to be alone, or apart from others. Often times we think of being isolated as being trapped alone on a deserted island, or locked away in a jail cell, but more commonly, one could be confined within themself as well. Within the realm of literature, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” both tackle the adversity of both physical and mental entrapment. It is worth noting that both of these authors are female, as women were hardly heard in the times these two were writing. Feelings of isolation and entrapment are tools of oppression, and can break the human spirit in times of hardship and peril.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 1892, after having suffered from severe postpartum depression, and being prescribed inactivity to solve her hysteria. She wrote in the appropriately named essay, “Why I Wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” detailing her problems with her doctor after suffering for three years: 

[He] put me to bed and applied the rest cure, to which a still good physique responded so promptly that he concluded there was nothing much the matter with me, and sent me home with solemn advice to "live as domestic a life as far as possible," to "have but two hours' intellectual life a day," and "never to touch pen, brush or pencil again as long as I lived." This was in 1887” (Gilman).

Keeping her locked away in her room for weeks is most definitely oppression through isolation. Doctors believed her mental illness to be hysteria, and that keeping her from writing her own intelligent thoughts was the solution. Her pain from being in a sort of exile inspired her to write the famous short story. “John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious. I am glad my case is not serious! But these nervous troubles are dreadfully depression. John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him” (Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” 317). This quote allows a look into the already quite warped perspective of the narrator after she has spent the past two weeks hidden away in the nursery of their home. She has built up a strong reliance on her husband, John, who simply keeps her in that yellow room despite her saying she wants to come out, even to go to a different spot in the house. By the end of page 318, her mental state is definitely confirmed as deteriorating, as she writes “I wish I could get well faster. But I must not think of that. This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had! There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down” (Gilman, 318-319). It is here where she first mentions another being living in that room with her, and from this point on, it only escalates, to the point where she stays up all night and shreds the paper off the walls as to free the creature, on page 326. This is similar to how inmates in prison react to isolation, as studied by Bandy X. Lee and Maya Prabhu of Stanford Law. “Social contact is like oxygen or food: we do not notice how essential it is until we have known suffocation or hunger. Isolation has been described to be as difficult, if not more, to withstand than physical torture” (A Reflection on the Madness in Prisons, Lee and Prabhu, 260). Of course, the character in The Yellow Wallpaper was not completely isolated in the way that prison inmates are, but it’s an interesting parallel, and worth noting how we as humans require socialization, and the narrator absolutely needed some true contact more than what she was given. The means of mental entrapment and oppression damage the state of which the victim thinks and acts, and it can drive them to literal madness, like it did to the narrator in Gilman’s piece.

“Children of the Sea” was published by Haitian author Edwidge Danticat in 1995 in her short story collection titled Krik? Krak!. In this story, the readers are introduced to a series of letters between two lovers, switching between the two as narrators; A man fleeing the country on a makeshift boat, and a woman who stayed home during a time of political corruption, and native power struggles. The point of view of the man tells the harsh tale of not only entrapment, but the sheer commitment to fleeing the country, as there are many others on board the dilapidated vessel. “I can’t tell exactly how far we are from there. We might be barely out of our own shores. There are no borderlines on the sea. The whole thing looks like one” (Danticat 6). Even though the young man is on a boat with plenty of other people, there is still a strong feeling of isolation tucked into this quote, as they are the only people for miles, surrounded by the sea, and they cannot even see where they have come from, or where they are going. An extremely important character in the man’s story is Célianne, a fifteen year old girl who was raped by soldiers back in Haiti, who gives birth on board the boat, and can’t cope with the ultimate loss of her baby. “Célianne is lying with her head against the side of the boat. The baby still will not cry. [...] She just cannot seem to let herself throw it into the ocean” (Danticat 23). For her, the baby, named Swiss, after the knife they used to cut the umbilical cord, had become an escape from her tragic situation, and fixating on her was a sort of coping mechanism, though an unhealthy one at that. This relates to isolation, as she no longer has any other family, and aside from the fact that, again, there are other people on the boat, Swiss is all she has left in this world since her brother was taken and it is not stated if her mother made it through the encounter with the soldiers. There are also tones of loneliness and isolation in the young woman back in Haiti’s perspective. On page 22, she writes:

while we were eating tonight, i told papa that i love you. i just want him to know that i have loved somebody in my life, in case something happens to one of us, i think he should know this about me, that i have loved someone besides only my mother and father in my life, i know you would understand (Danticat).

The feeling of losing a loved one, especially with the uncertainty of the entire situation, can be truly heartbreaking, and can lead one to feel disconnected from those around them. Neither narrator is ever sure if anything they’re writing will ever reach their lover, but they try to find solace in the idea of one another, despite the isolation.

Australian singer and songwriter Jenna McDougall of the band Tonight Alive had experienced similar isolation to the characters in Gilman and Danticat’s works, and documented them through song on her band’s sophomore album, The Other Side, which was released in 2013. The first track, “The Ocean”, is a description of McDougall’s sickness after having been away from home touring with the band, and how she had fallen so ill they had to cancel the rest of their trip, and her recovery. “Oh, I can't put my finger on my feelings / Put my ear to the ceiling, where is that coming from? / Where are you coming from?” (The Ocean, McDougall and Taahi). This can be related to the narrator’s struggle with delusions in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, as McDougall had also spent time feeling alienated by her illness, and only wished to get better sooner. The lines of the chorus, “I've been praying for the day that my spirit is finally free / Some days it feels like the ocean lies inside of me” (The Ocean, McDougall and Taahi), can related to the male perspective in Danticat’s “Children of the Sea”, not only because of the oceanic reference, but also to the fact that the man states that he is expecting and ready to accept his death, thus freeing his spirit. The ninth track, off the same album, “Bathwater”, can also connect to the two stories, as it is a continuation of the narrative introduced in the previously mentioned song. In the Track by Track video that the band released as a sort of liner notes, McDougall recounts how she would bathe in bleach to escape her own mental demons since she was feeling so horribly ill. She writes “I watch the sun coming up / Over the trees and rooftops / It’s like it’s pissing the sky / I wish it all could just stop / So I can replay this scene / And live like life is a dream”, which could be a reference to how when in isolation, it is easy to feel as though you’re reliving the same period of time over and over, since nothing is changing in between. This is similar to how all the narrator in Gilman’s story is look outside the window and see the outside surroundings every day, but never do anything else.

To be isolated, one does not have to be literally alone. It’s an emotional lacking that will do the most damage, be it prescribed by a doctor, encountered out at sea, faced under the name of uncertainty, or brought on by poor health. The stories published by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edwidge Danticat, as well as the music of Jenna McDougall, can all exemplify the adversity and damage that being mentally alone can abstain. To be entrapped this way is to be closed in inside oneself, and suffocating there, away from the outside world.