A Chair of One’s Own

A Chair of One’s Own is a story about a young girl who is experiencing social alienation. She feels out of place among her peers, marginalized, and alien, as she is from a very different cultural background, which is evident in her clothing and her speech as well as in her not understanding social “codes.” She is shunned by the girls in her class and is lonely. She feels marginalized and is overwhelmed by a sense of rejection when she is in school. She ‘escapes’ to an ornate ancient chair in her beloved grandmother’s house, a place where she is safe. Through it, she finds a sense of inner strength and feels like a queen in the face of her mocking peers. The girl has no name in order to keep her universal and easy to relate to. The story is told through the girl’s stream-of-consciousness.

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      The story’s rationale uses the chair as a way for the girl to create a safe place for herself with the chair serving as a vehicle for guided imagery that leads her to a state of physical ease and emotional serenity. Hence, the story is told by recalling events and feelings in a stream-of-consciousness kind of prose in order to connect to the idea of guided meditation through imagery. According to Gerald Epstein’s book Guided Imagery, mental visualization can be used to improve one’s physical and emotional state. It is a technique that allows children to connect to their inner worlds through imagination, producing calming thoughts, which lead to physical relaxation and the experience of a safe place that can be imagined and retrieved, as well as to the release of negative emotions. It is suggested as a relatively easy and immediate tool for calming down in ‘crisis’ situations. Epstein also suggests that once practiced, the method can be used again when the next crisis occurs.”1 The girl’s upright position in the chair with her hands resting loosely on the armrests is actually the basic position for this practice.

      The story is also based on elements from Kohut’s psychology of the self-object’ which defines the ‘other,’ and in this tale it is the grandmother – as an extension or continuation of the child’s ‘self’– who helps the child build a solid and stable sense of self. This extension enables the validation of feelings and experiences, building self-image and self-perception, as well as regulating feelings of stress and discomfort utilizing another object. The grandmother’s very casual and complete acceptance and her quiet reflection helps the girl learn to create her strong inner place and to use it.2 I chose to image a relationship between the girl and her grandmother rather than one with her parents because relationships with grandparents are removed from the day-to-day raising and educational conflicts that parents face. Thus children can experience a love free of constraints and enjoy being the center of attention.
The story ends in an optimistic vein, when the girl learns to connect to her inner place and to activate it and thus experience a sense of peace, which helps her to change the nature of her reality in terms of the girls in her class. Moreover, the incipient change in the girl’s relationship with her classmates is intended to emphasize the notion that fortifying one’s self-confidence can not only engender change, but can allow one to realize that the ‘other’ is not necessarily “evil.” This interaction was also created to offer the possibility that we all act according to the “inner stories” that we tell ourselves about our surroundings and the motives of the people around us. These “inner stories” can cause us to react either aggressively or by withdrawing. Building a strong sense of self allows for a clear view and acceptance of the ‘other.’
The story also suggests that there are no absolute social norms such as who is “queen/king” and questions whether we have to comply to such an assumption or can choose to find alternative societies either in the form of a group – the boys in the story – or the girl playing games she likes alone.

      Inspired by Robert Frost’s well-known poem “The Road not Taken,” in which he wrote about standing at a crossroads and looking toward a path that he ultimately did not choose, I decided to have the book printed on translucent vellum paper. That is not just a gimmick. The translucent sheets manifest the canvas of the story as a continuum of space and reflect the story’s process visually. Not an opaque page, separate and fragmented from the sequence of the complete story, it allows the reader to see the sequence, the development, and the whole of the story, in a visual process that mirrors the narrative sequence and reflects the evolving change. Through the partial transparency, the reader can perceive, perhaps subliminally, the continuity of the story and its illustrations as a path that one goes through – as a process toward healing. Thus the physical structure of the book reflects the story itself and reading with the visual interface directs and conveys a feeling that the reader can experience even without words.

      The illustrations I created, are not “classical” children illustrations in the conventional sense. I contend that children understand much more than what we might expect. The images, which were created by drawing over photographic processing are designed to help the viewer understand the text beyond what is actually written. For example, the first image in which the girl is sitting in a chair that seems to come to life suggests that the girl’s imagination has a real existence and the last illustration where the girl is rocking freely on the toy horse is shadowed by an upright female rider suggests the possibility of her future growth and development.
      Finally, why is the book bound in a paperback although this type of binding is already an accepted format in children’s books?
      The reasoning concerns the essence of the story and complements it. The tale attempts to convey the need to form a strong sense of self which allows for a clear view and acceptance of the ‘other.’ The soft binding is another reflection of this concept.

 

 

Dalia-Ruth Halperin

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[1] Gerald Epstein, Healing Visualizations: Creating Heath Through Imagery (New York, Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group: 1989), pp. 4-6, 11-12, 15-17.

[2] Heinz Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure? (Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 1984), pp. 191-199.