Ordinary Wallpaper: Identity and Use of History

摘要

In the opening line of "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), Charlotte Perkins Gilman identified her characters as ordinary people living within a place that has history. As her story developed, the history of those people and that place intertwined in ways that made it difficult for the narrator to separate her own "self and the interior of her room. In similar ways, the history of interiors and the history of human activity within spaces are meshed and inseparable. Yet, as Gilman's narrator also suggests, we perceive an unusual significance in ordinary people interacting with history. This article reports one family's stories about living in their own "ancestral halls." The everyday stories of this family are not unusual, but are significant for showing how their understanding of history informs design and design history.