“for the windows are barred for the little children, and there are rings and things in the walls”
This quotation reveals another important element of the setting which the narrator inhabits: the bars that appear on the windows of her room. These bars represent the confinement and isolation of the narrator within this setting, and the way in which she was “imprisoned.” While she is not physically locked within this room, the elements of the room imprison her mind and reveal something about the status of women during the time period. As the narrator describes, the windows are barred as if the room were for “little children”, rendering the narrator equivalent to a child. One could argue that the infantilization of the woman narrator places her below, or less than, her male counterpart. J. Samaine Lockwood sheds light on the degradation of women and limiting their advancement in society by connecting the bars on the windows to a form of imprisonment: “But as the reader and the narrator soon realize, this room’s function as a prison, replete with bars on the windows and ‘rings and things’ in the walls, has remained unchanged over time…[I]t has become a document that attests to a history of female imprisonment and stasis, not male progression in history” (Lockwood 103). Lockwood asserts that these constraints “remain unchanged over time” and attest to “a history”, showing that Gilman suggests that the female narrator is only the most recent example of this forced “stasis.” Similar to this, Gilman’s use of a colonial mansion to represent this prison and nursery setting reveals that women’s infantilization and restriction from advancement has been going on for centuries and has not improved at all during that time. Therefore, the narrator is stuck in a suppressed role that has not progressed as time has moved forward – and the bars on the windows force the narrator to stay conscious of this.
