The Master Bedroom Exhibit: Confinement

This is the Wylie House Museum's Three Wylie Women: A Generation of Late Nineteenth-Century Mothers exhibit space in the Master Bedroom. A surprisingly public space, the master bedroom of the Wylie House could have been used as another room for entertainment. The double doors would be opened and furniture pushed to the side, allowing for larger events to spill into this room. Again, this public use of supposedly private space exemplifies the contradictions of the domestic, woman’s sphere. Family letters indicate that this room may have also been Louisa’s room in 1881, where she stayed with her children while her husband, Hermann, lived away from the family, teaching in Williamstown, Massachusetts. But for the exhibit, the master bedroom has been transformed into a birthing room, a site of anticipation, fear, excitement, and womanhood.