is a semi-autobiographical short story by the American writer and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) "which she wrote after a severe bout of post-partum depression." [Source].  Gilman addressed the International Congress of Women in Berlin in 1903, afterward touring Europe in 1904.



Stories tell stories sometimes.  Stories reveal themselves, like photographs, over time.  What Gilman was saying in her story of the woman confined to a bedroom with yellow wallpaper was more than some of her readers in 1892 could appreciate or understand.  Her male readers at least. 

But some stories nag at us, like a picture we keep coming back to.  Sometimes we ask for a second opinion.  I ask Bianca.  What is it about this picture, I ask.  Or is it just me?

I'll take the Buick with the lady, says Bianca.  You can have the little girl and the nurse.  Look at the way she holds her arm, she adds.

Look at the pattern cut on the bias, I say, which I think means what I think it means, about the way the angle of the pattern on the housedress flows.

Look at the way the lines of the photograph converge.  The line of the bricks that angles down and into the car's bumper, intersecting the angle of the lady's dress pattern, forming an X where the shadow lies under the car.  An X below the woman's waist.  The child looks away but the nurse is bowed in that direction.  What is the focus of the composition?  Not the dog - a mere blur of collie.  Where is the eye directed?

If you pull back, there is curiously less rather than more.  The unhelpful darkness of foliage on the left and more of the predictable brick of house which tells us nothing we didn't already know (or could easily assume), the facade reflecting the sun and emerging from the shadows of the trees but hardly forthcoming, its features shot on the bias and directing the eye away from itself and down to the righthand corner.   

The photographer seems to be an interloper, doesn't he?  On a rise, at a distance, even perhaps on the other side of a fence of sorts -- in the neighbor's yard?  The figures, unaware of being photographed, unposed, absorbed in their own affairs, form a grouping which is out of center, relegated to the lower right of frame and yet still the apparent subject or focus.  See how the lines of the house draw the viewer's attention, accentuated and underscored by the driveway.  Your eye is drawn to that area of sunlight where the two women and child are, where the angles converge and intersect, the way it happens in one of those Renaissance paintings where the perspective is so skillfully and cleverly forced and makes you see the Angel come to tell Mary the news.  Or is it the Virgin with St. Anne?   Or, since there's a child involved, the Adoration?   

The nurse bows to the child, her head in line with the baseline of the house, which alligns itself with the angle of the bumper, which in turn is emphasized by the strong horizontal of driveway -- notice how the nurse in her whiteness barely interrupts the flow -- which terminates in the shadow under the Buick and the place where the chrome curves around to meet the lines of a mauve housedress.    

 

You are probably expecting some kind of payoff now, and I will disappoint you.  I hope not too bitterly.  I'm sorry.  Don't be mad, but I confess I don't know what it all means, beyond knowing that the little girl will grow up to love dogs, that is.  I don't know what the whole story here is.  I have never been to this house, for instance.  Really, in a way, this could almost be as much a picture of your family as it is of anyone's, or of mine.  You could take the parts that interest you and leave the rest.  The gesture of the lady, for instance, her hand drawn up to her neck.  Or you could look and see something I  don't.   And that is perhaps why the picture interests me.  The ambiguity.  

I think Gilman's story reads differently today than it did in 1892.  More of what she intended is revealed to us now, about the lives of women in her time.  Time does that to stories.  Also to other forms of art. 

Or perhaps there's a story here that is not the story the photographer intended.  An unintended narrative.  Something he didn't plan on telling you.  Or yet again, maybe he meant to say something else but he didn't know how.  He meant to tell you something you wouldn't have understood at the time, because you weren't there.  But he assumed there would be time to tell you later, some other time, when you were older.