Yellow Wallpaper– Jane?

Throughout “The Yellow Wallpaper” there is an interesting, and ongoing challenge for the narrator.  As she is forced to live in what can be compared to a low security prison (bars on the windows, bed nailed to the floor) she begins to lose herself and in a sense her creativity. The interesting side of this tale of repression is that really through the putting down of the narrator into this room she really begins to exercise her creativity more than before.  Of course the girl she sees in the wall paper can be drawn in direct comparison to the narrator herself.  Both trapped within the same yellow wallpaper, and both needing an escape.  There isn’t really a girl trapped in the wallpaper of this room, however she sees one.   The very reason for her being confined to this room—the husbands idea of resting her creativity—is what leads to her being more creative than even before her confinement.  One thing that seemed to confuse me about this story is near the end.  Right before the ending of this passage the narrator refers to ‘Jane.’  I’m really confused by who Jane is, and even after scanning through the story again I didn’t see anything about a Jane being introduced to the story.  This seems like maybe it would be interesting to look into, but so far I was completely confused by this.  Maybe I just missed something really obvious? Not sure, but let me know!

State of Delusion

When first reading and discussing The Yellow Wallpaper, I noticed that everyone had a different interpretation of what this story actually means. After learning more about the author, I could not help but think that the main character was  a lot like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, She was a women who suffered from hysteria and was ordered to rest by those around her. A lot of the challenges like these were ones that the main character had to face. The main character was slowly moved to a state of delusion by thinking that things move within the yellow wallpaper. It soon takes over her life and that rustic yellow is all she can see or think about. While reading I wanted to compare the woman in the wallpaper with the main character. I felt as if this is what she felt like, locked in a room by herself. Her imagination took over her thoughts and she would do anything to help the woman who was “trapped”  within the confines of the paper. Another thought that popped into my mind was if this was how the actual author had felt when doctors told her to rest. I am a firm believer in authors writing what they know. That only leads me to conclude that Gilman may have felt the same way as her character?

Overall I enjoyed reading this story. I always like Gothic, and mysterious stories to keep you on edge.

-Meghan Thomas

“The front pattern does move–and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!”

From the stories we read/will read, The Yellow Wallpaper is the only one I had read in high school and when I read it in 10th grade 3 years ago, it seemed like a very strange, gothic story. I even watched a video version of it on youtube if anyone is interested, there is one version with parts. it’s pretty creepy but it kind of goes with the story and might create a better image of the story for some.

I knew how the story ended from the beginning so I paid attention to every little detail involving the narrator. What struck me this time was the way John treated the narrator. When I read it before, I thought John was very caring and wanted the best for the narrator- which is true, but only to an extent. He does a lot for the narrator, but what she needs isn’t much. she just needs to do some entertaining things like actually being able to write without hiding the paper and going out and being active in society. It seems like John is helping her – he really is trying in a way, or at least that is the sense we get – but he imprisoned her and she tells him many times throughout the story that she doesn’t like this place and at least asks to move to the upstairs bedroom but john refuses and says he knows what’s best for her. The wallpaper starts having images of a woman and then even women and even then John does not get the hint that this place is driving the narrator crazy and she is going into a deep depression. We can tell that John really does love the narrator and probably thinks this really is the way she will get better but the fact that she has no say in what is going on and that John won’t realize that it’s getting worse is really sad. I think John could have – should have- saved her. I get the point that Gilman is trying to make but I would rather have had an ending where the narrator did not go insane and was removed from the room and even the house and just not prisoned. Gilman is  symbolizing the wallpaper as a way women were treated – as housewives and trapped in the dominancy of men- but the way she uses a thing so simple like a wallpaper (and uses that to create a really good imagery in our minds) is really striking and I think that’s probably why this short story is very popular and well written.

Who is Jane? Perhaps that is her name? Or maybe it is the woman on the wallpaper’s name. The ambiguousity of who Jane is made this story have a very interesting  end.

The Exponential Function of “The Yellow Wallpaper”

The “Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is an intriguing and confusing read. The short story focuses on a woman confined in a bewildering yellow-papered room in which the woman’s “illness” is worsened. Her affliction is basically her tiredness, but as the story continues and her obsession with the yellow wallpaper grows and grows, her sickness changes with it. At first, her impression of the wallpaper was disgust, derision, and anger, which mirrored the main character’s behaviors, emotions, and overall well-being. As she continues to study the wallpaper and finds the “pointless pattern” to be in actuality, something inanimate in which she had “never [seen] so much expression.” Her fascination expands at an exponential rate, and as it climbs towards its pinnacle, she seems to not get tired as easily as before her hatred started to subside, and she seems to also have more energy and says, “Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be.” Especially at night and when she is alone in the room, the main character “creeps” around in the room, trying to catch a woman she deems to be stuck in the wallpaper. In her “creeping,” she expends most of her energy, so her “illness” seems to be getting the best of her in the eyes of John and Jennie because when they are present, she is mostly sleeping. Their concern and oppressive behaviors towards her, I believe, fueled her desire to find out the mysteries of the wallpaper, and free the woman, just as an escape from her oppressive friends and family, and society as a whole. In her telling of the story as the narrator, her words suggest a frenzied agitation and excited urge to free the woman behind the paper (which could correlate with the narrator, as the woman behind the pen), and so drove her to act hysterically and go to desperate measures in order to fulfill her mission. The main character’s emotion (illness) and her fascination with the wallpaper act as correlating variables of a exponential function, always hand in hand, one influencing and disturbing the dependent variable (her behavior).

Ohhh the Irony!

The story the Yellow Wallpaper was a very bland short story, but had a few very good motifs.  One in particular just jumped out at me from this story.  Irony.  It seemed like almost every other sentence of the Yellow Wallpaper was ironic in some way.  For example the line,” John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.” is an example of verbal irony.  The narrator said one thing but meant the exact opposite by saying it.  The irony found throughout this story is mostly verbal.  However, there are also examples of dramatic irony in the Yellow Wallpaper.  Examples like when the narrator described a room with bars on its windows and furniture nailed to the ground and then says that it must have once been a nursery.  This is obviously sarcastic and an example of irony.  There is also, I believe, another example of irony found in one of the character’s actions.  Whenever John’s treatment doesn’t work on his wife and in fact deepens her depression and makes things worse when he was in fact trying to cure her.  The point is, there is plenty of irony in this story; but why?  Why would Gilman want to be so ironic and sarcastic?  Is this somehow a cry for help from her real life written into one of her short stories?  Or maybe Gilman is just a sarcastic asshole.  Who really knows?

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The Lady with the Dog

This was like a Nicholas Sparks story but from the early years. Anna and Dmitri fall in love but they are both married and they have an affair and still want to see each other. At first it was like any other affair to Dmitri and he thought he would get over her like he did get rid of the rest of his affairs. But this isn’t about just falling in love. Dmitri realizes he’s getting old and Anna seems  young, lovely, and naive to him. She seems different than the other women he’s been with and even when she left, she was different, she didn’t leave (literally and figuratively) like the rest.

“I shall remember you . . . think of you,” she said. “God be with you; be happy. Don’t remember evil against me. We are parting forever — it must be so, for we ought never to have met. Well, God be with you.”

She was pretty much saying that what they had was special in a way but now they must return to reality-to their spouses and pretend like nothing ever happened.

When Dmitri went to see Anna, she told him to go away at first and she was frightened someone was going to see them together because her husband and she were kind of known in the neighborhood and she didn’t want anyone to see Dmitri with her. But when Dmitri confessed his love to her, she told him she has been thinking about him too and tells him that she will visit him in Moscow as long as he leaves now. In the end, Chekhov creates a somewhat intense ending by saying that it is only the beginning for them even though they are both married. This creates a good effect on readers because now they now that what Anna and Dmitri had was different than what they both had with their spouses and with Dmitri’s affairs. The ending was just the beginning and we can only imagine how things turned out for them with everything going on with their lives.

Trapped and Confined.

I believe that when Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” she made herself become the actual narrator to her story.Gilman suffered from depression after she had her daughter and was subjected to a “rest cure” where she couldn’t even hold a pencil in her hand, and I guess those stages of her life inspired her to write “The Yellow Wallpaper”. I felt that the narrator had to lose herself in order to understand who she really was. What seemed like the right thing for John to do when it came to treating his wife and riding her of her imagination was not the best of cures . His treatment can not be deemed a treatment for her disorder, because it made her worse than she was initially. The narrator was treated as a child and her say in things didn’t matter majority of the time.The only thing she was able to control was her fantasies. I feel like the wallpaper symbolizes the domestic life that traps women in our  society,such as family and household issues. The house was a domestic mental institute, that would never help with a full recovery in anybody, it has many oppressive qualities like bars on the windows and a bed that is nailed to the floor. This story is a Gothic themed story in that it has claustrophobic and confined spaces in the setting and gloomy moods. There is no happy ending to this story and it is very depressing. I read this story in high school and reading it this second time around made some things more clearer.

-Ashley Saint-Cyr

The Yellow Wallpaper

The story was very interesting. The fact that a lady was locked in a room by her husband to “help” her get better didn’t sit right with me. To began with, the author describe the house as a ” A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity,” stating that she was scared of the house herself. The narrator, being the the wife that was trapped in the room, gave the story the language of more of a horror story. Thoughout the story, the wife was deteriorating, imaging certain images and figures in the wall paper and outside. ” There is a delicious garden! I never saw such a garden–large and shady, full of box-bordered paths, and lined with long grape-covered arbors with seats under them,” was one of the descriptions giving from the wife from the room. In another description she gave a very depressed one, stating that she had two personalities. Also in the story she describe a lady trapped behind the paper.

There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will.
Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.
It is always the same shape, only very numerous.
And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder–I begin to think–I wish John would take me away from here!

This description explained the feeling of the wife. She was trapped in the room just as the lady behind the wallpaper. She felt as if she was seeing things she just was coming at ease with her sickness and noticing it. The story was great.

Love At First Sight! <3

I believe that “The Lady with the Dog” was a very realistic story in that there are many individuals that live their lives the way Dimitri and Anna did, in secrecy.A marriage that has complete fidelity is hard to find,as it was hard for Anna and Dimitri to be happy with their spouses. Their love affair was kind of creepy to me because he was a grown man with someone that could have been his daughter, and when he  took it upon himself to go visit her was the icing on the cake. Anna has to live her life in a lie, and it will be a while before they can have an open relationship. Their relationship must have sparked from past disappointments and will possibly bring about future and present desires. Dimitri say that women is the “lower race”, but yet he can’t live his life without them, so women’s importance should be held to a higher degree, especially since he goes through women like a fine-tooth comb. Dimitri dislike women because he say that the past women he was with made him bitter, but he fell in love with Anna after a couple of weeks, unless they were destined to be with each other. This reminds me of of the story We, where D503 said he hated I330 with all his heart, but ended up falling in love with her after some time. This makes me wonder if the love is really genuine or is it just lust? The reason I chose the picture below was because it represents individuals that try to rid themselves of their past encounters by using the “backspace” key so that they can create an ideal lifestyle where they can live freely. But what many fail to notice is that everything that happens in the darkness will come out in the light.

-Ashley Saint-Cyr

The Lady with the Dog

The Lady with the Dog was a very interesting story. The author use the concept of romanticism and painted the reader a image of every emotion throughout the story. Even though he used few words, the author made his point with the words he used. The author started the story out with describing the “lady with the dog.” “Sitting in Verney’s pavilion, he saw, walking on the sea-front, a fair-haired young lady of medium height, wearing a béret; a white Pomeranian dog was running behind her,” in these few words, the author gave the reader an image of the lady. The way he describe the lady let the reader know the protagontist was attracted to her. With the affair going on, the two had grown connected to each other. This is similar to how society is now. “Forgiven? No. I am a bad, low woman; I despise myself and don’t attempt to justify myself. It’s not my husband but myself I have deceived. And not only just now; I have been deceiving myself for a long time,” the express the feeling Ann was feeling about the affair. The protagonist, Gurov, was use to having affairs and this was a regular to him. Towards the end Gurov went to Ann to express the feeling he had for her that he thought will go away. He surprised her at an opera event. The way he used one sentence to describe the moment draw a huge picture for the reader, “…she, this little woman, in no way remarkable, lost in a provincial crowd, with a vulgar lorgnette in her hand, filled his whole life now, was his sorrow and his joy, the one happiness that he now desired for himself, and to the sounds of the inferior orchestra, of the wretched provincial violins, he thought how lovely she was. He thought and dreamed.” I really enjoyed this reading.

Mariah Rucker