Anna Jarvis

For this project, I designed and created two costumes inspired by characters from the 1892 Short Story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. These characters were "The Woman", the narrative’s central character, and "The Wallpaper Woman", whom The Woman begins to see in the walls as she descends into madness. My goal for this concept was to explore the role of women’s bodies in a historically inspired, horrific narrative. I aimed to incorporate themes relating to the treatment of women suffering mental illness throughout history, and to consider how the legacies of these practices continue to affect contemporary audiences. Through these characters, I hoped to incorporate visual components and elements which are suggestive of gothic and body horror, creating an overall outcome which is visually unsettling or uncomfortable to the audience, whilst still possessing a strange beauty. I proposed to achieve this through using tactile materials like latex and velvet to create a creepy, unsettling aesthetic. I decided to use these materials as I felt that they evoked the grotesque and uncomfortable, considering ideas of abjection (Kristeva, 1982) and the monstrous feminine (Creed, 1993), and how we can display the inside, outside. I felt there was a connection between these academic theories of the horror genre with the subject matter I wanted to explore, specifically through ideas of physical and societal transgression.