Realism

To compare the realism in The Real Thing and the Maid of St. Phillipe is no easy task.  The troubles begin with understanding the vagueness of what being a realist or what a realist piece of work is.  If there is a straying away from emotions and spirituality then how real is The Maid of St. Phillipe, where the character Marianne is nearly transcended as a spirit as she rides away into the sun to live with the Cherokees, juxtaposed against the boring scenery and setting of the Real Thing, its hard to consider them both within the same genre.  It can be argued that every genre ever is realism, just another version of real life, bastardized or mutated into something beautiful and poetic.  Maybe it is in the description of things instead of feelings, that is the only similarities I found between the two.  Description of whats in front of you, put the reader in the scene and let his or her emotions flourish, do not assume that your emotions are universal.  This is where I see strength and individuality in realism, that way noone can ever read the same story twice because a deserted desert town can symbolize many things for many people, and there can be many different reactions to how one thrives or tries to survive in that environment.

-Damian Hunt

Maid of Saint Phillipe Additional Commentary

To expand on my previous commentary I’d like to refrain from discussin gender stereotypes as an occasion for the short story to be written.  By labeling characteristic as either male or female completely contradicts the message I belive Kate Chopin was trying to portray.  I think with this short story Kate Chopin was trying to focus on the free spirit, the independence that Marianne contained within her.  This spirit surpasses any gender role, and is in no means reserved for one or another.  It is not a story about a girl whos strong because she is like a man,  It is a story about a girl who is strong because she is like no one else.  She is the black sheep who runs off into the mountains when everyone she knew was herded towards St. Louis.  No man and no woman held her independence or her strength and I think this is what Kate Chopin wanted to portray.  A personality trait, a type of being that goes way past what it means to be man or woman, the real argument is what it means to be alive and free and what it means to be just another sheep getting herded along the road of stereotypes and prejudices.  And anyone who reads this with a sexual or gender analysis is just scraping the surface of the true message behind the Maid of St. Phillipe, and that is be yourself.

-Damian Hunt

The Yellow Wallpaper

The Yellow Wallpaper was a very haunting story, not one hundred percent gothic but still very creepy. The narrator is clearly suffering from a condition of psychosis which in that day was a common diagnosis for women who were supposed to be quiet and domestic. She is instead of being put in an asylum she is put in more of a domestic institution, which is no more than a mansion but to her is like a prison. While being cooped up in this one room all day long she begins to depend on the wallpaper and her own imagination for her freedom. The woman she sees in the wallpaper is like her alter ego which by the end of the story takes over and she becomes the woman in the wallpaper forever trapped and unable to escape. This treatment that is supposed to help her get better is the thing that unhinges her and in the end makes her crazy. The room was three different rooms before it became her prison, It was a nursery, then a playroom and finally a gymnasium which I think are the stages she goes through in the story. Passivity to activity in where she is doing what she is told in the beginnning and then by the end she has gone full blown crazy where she starts stripping the wallpaper off the wall trying to free the woman who is behind the wallpaper, and in turn free herself. When she starts to fully realize her isolation is when her mind and mental capacity starts to deteriorate which leads to insanity. There is one point where she alludes to there may be other women besides the one behind the wall paper and there may have been women before her who were trying to get them out as well because when they got there some of the yellow wallpaper was already stripped off so they may have been going insane as well. The room might also have something to do with the reason that the narrator and possibly women before her have gone insane. But her husband and his sister do absolutely nothing to help her in this situation especially with the fact that they treat her like a child.

The Lady with the Dog

I didn’t like The Lady with the Dog because, to me, it was just another cheesy and predictable love story, except creepier. There are two married individuals that meet and have an affair, then have to be apart while constantly thinking of each other. Obviously the two are reunited and end up together, though this time there’s no clear resolution. I really dislike reading these types of stories because you predict the ending but are never explicitly told what actually happens. I also couldn’t decide if this story was very realistic. Sure, the events happening throughout the story seem to be plausible and could happen in real life – meeting someone through a dog (though it’s usually the guy with a puppy…), writing letters, cheating on your spouse – though the overall story seemed a bit far-fetched to me. The fact that they maintained such contact and were able to keep the affair a secret, were able to meet up with no prior contact (when Dmitri stalks Anna at the theatre), and actually decided to start a life together to get away from their unhappy marriages just seemed too good to be true. Things like this just don’t happen very often in real life, even if the individual events of the story do.

The Chopin-Gilman Connection

“The Yellow Wallpaper” makes my Top 5 effective feminist works. In an era still before 1900, Charlotte Gilman and her contemporary, Kate Chopin, each wrote an 1892 story about women and their relationship to the social ties that frequently bound them to have lesser freedoms than men. Despite the drastically different actions of their protagonists (Marianne trudges off into the woods, while the narrator of “Wallpaper” goes insane), each makes a good case for the freedom’s of women. When I first read “Wallpaper” in high school, I wouldn’t have noticed the Gilman-Chopin connection (despite reading The Awakening), but it almost seems that these two women tag-teamed to show people what could happen to a woman when she has the ability to make her own decisions, or what happens when she is cooped up and denied the freedom to go where she chooses.

Obviously, Gilman’s work is an entirely different story. The narrator’s imagination is stifled by her husband–one could say Marianne made the wiser choice to leave such suitors like Captain Vaudry behind (assuming, though, Vaudry deep-down has the same character as the narrator’s husband, John). Gilman’s character, instead of being free to roam anywhere (as Marianne does in the countryside), is confined to a room because of her nervous tendencies. Lacking the resolve to oppose her husband and see that she is not really as “sick” as he is twisted and domineering, Gilman effectively shows what can happen to women who don’t fight for themselves–they lose themselves, with the greatest representation being how Gilman’s character eventually loses her mind.

The women in the wallpaper actually scare me: it’s as if they are prisoners who are mute, a horror which cannot be seen. The way they seem to try and crawl out of the walls makes me think of soldiers trapped in trench warfare during World War I. On the inside, this is the despondent state in which women who do not stand up for themselves can find themselves in.

Call of the Not Too Wild

Chekov’s “Lady with the Dog” is a homage in many ways to naturalism and harkens to writers such as Emerson or Thoreau. While the story seems centered on a steamy love affair, nature is actually relatively confined in the story. It does not absolutely influence people; two examples prove that nature combines with a sense of realism in this story. The first example is the dog itself. The dog–an animal which is part of the natural world with its flora and fauna–serves as the plot device for Dmitri and Anna’s meeting. While their relationship seems to be started by their meeting via her dog, it is (at least temporarily) broken off when Anna’s husband sends her a message through the mail (a human construct).

Despite this sense of parity, I cannot help but find the realistic qualities of the stories to stand out more–as it connects more easily to humanity and plights in people’s lives. I find it interesting how Chekov has all of Dmitri’s and Anna’s affair blocked by issues outside the natural world. By this, I mean structured, societal norms. For example, Anna falls back to her God when she is–for a while–denying herself to Dmitri, thinking she should follow the tenets of marital fidelity (many people in the “real” world follow this same viewpoint). Perhaps realism is what causes the guilt in their relationship: Dmitri is a man who wants to appear lofty (here I will harken to Dostoevsky, who in Notes from Underground wrote about how many Russian men tried to fulfill the role as rescuer of the promiscuous woman, and represented, lofty less practical European ideals), one who seems to have all the correct mannerisms but is not himself (a constraint of the real presence and influence of social norms).

Therefore, in reality, Dmitri and Anna’s love affair might be a “rescue” from her uncaring husband, but Dmitri eventually feels guilt for his lies and how he initially misled Anna into thinking of him as a lofty man when he is more of an old man. In other words, reality hits him. He is a misguided soul, and has taken Anna with him down this guilty. I’m not so surprised anymore that authors of this time referred to Satan as “the Old Gentlemen;” the false impression Dmitri gives of himself will lead Anna further and further into guilt, instead of the happiness she originally thought he would provide.

Girl Power!

In the short story, “The Maid of Saint Phillippe”, the theme of masculinity reoccurs all throughout the novel. Marianne, the protagonist of the story is often described with masculine like diction using words like “supple”, “stag”, “strong” which in 1891 were terms that weren’t used to describe women. Chopin compares her to the opposite sex as she states, “she looked like a handsome boy rather than like the French girl of seventeen that she was”. What is interesting is that before the story even begins, Chopin summarizes the story and illustrates Marianne as a “lofty character with a noble purpose”. In a way, the author is reassuring the audience that although the character is different than what is to be expect, she is the heroine. Chopin uses many examples of similes and imagery to illustrate Marianne’s masculinity as she states, “Marianne carried a gun across her shoulder as easily as a soldier might”. Girls at that time were never seen carrying guns because they did not partake in killing or war, and a strong possibility was that the guns were too heavy to be carried by women, but for Marianne this was not the case. She is described to be wearing “buckskin trappings” which along with the gun hints at the idea of her being a hunter giving Marianne an even more masculine image. As the most active character in this story, Marianne is shown taking in the first born son role, taking her father’s will as she states,“My life belongs to my father. I have but to follow his will; whatever that may be”. In fact, if I were to read this sentence, I would have first thought this was a son saying this about his father. The roles that Marianne has with other men in the story are reversed as well. Marianne’s relationship with Jacques like Captain Vaundry seems like cases of unrequited love. In most stories, the woman is the character who is desperately in love with man and pleads with him to love her and marry her and so on, however, Marianne is the complete opposite as Chopin illustrates how unsubmissive Marianne is to both men, and society, “While Vaundry sat dumb with pain and motionless with astonishment; while Jacques was hoping for a message, Marianne had turned their back upon all of them”.

week 3 Yellow Newspaper

This story is interesting because it shows how people especially woman who were thought too have a mental condition were treated in a wrong way. She often descibes the wallpaper as a sign of all the other people that have been imprisoned in the same room as she was. I also feel like she has way to much respect towards her husband who is not listening to her and thinking she is just crazy. Instead of curing her from whatever mental disorder she has he is just making her worse off. I think John is not a bad guy in the story but he is mislead. He thinks he knows how to cure her and thinks he is doing the right thing. In reality he is too full of himself to realize that he is actually driving her crazy. Her dream in for the rest of her life is to get out of that room and be like one of the people she sees through the window. only her husband can grant this dream.

The Lady With the Dog

I have mixed feelings about this book. This is mainly because there is a part in which the narrator compares the woman he wishes to bed to his daughter, because they are both naive. With that being said, I love the author’s writing style. The water always has many colors when it is described whereas Dmitri has gray hair and wears gray suits. When the author describes Ana as his, “sorrow and his joy” I absolutely adored it. Their insecurities about their feelings for one another is interesting as it mimics an actual relationship, in which the two participants are not married to other people. But these insecurities also bring about the question- what happened to them earlier in their lives? Why does Anna become sad after watching the steamer come in? Is it what she is about to do with the man that is not her husband, or is it because of some dark, repressed memory that somehow leads her to do what she does? Anyway, I feel that this story is intriguing because there is a mystery about the characters’ past and about their future. They are to live two lives until they can enjoy one another openly. They have a long road before they can be truly happy together, he even compares his marriage to, “an intolerable bondage.” I do like this story because it seems as though Anna is saving him from becoming a bitter, old womanizer. She, in a way, is his salvation as he has found a woman that intrigues him and will maybe make him rethink his view of women as, “the lower race.” One can only hope that the affair works out in their favor.

The Yellow Wallpaper

This story is an interesting one. It involves a split between the woman’s reality and her inner self, for normal people there is no split. We are our inner selves in our every day lives. I think this novel is almost a social commentary for women of that time period who are trying to break out of their traditional roles and their domestic routines. She is the woman trapped in the wallpaper. This diary is her escape. I do not think that John was an absolutely terrible person in this story, he was just trying to help her cope with her depression. However, I feel he is too rational for the narrator and too much of an authoritarian to be in a relationship with anyone. He is just too strong-willed to listen to his wife’s input and he is a major cause of her unhappiness and of her feeling like she needs to escape.  I do not like how the author almost leaves us with this, “I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane.” Why would the author choose to leave us with this horrible mystery? Who is Jane? Is that a pet name for her husband? Doubtful. I hate when authors do this as it leaves it entirely up to the readers’ interpretation. There is a right answer as to who Jane is and only one person knows it- the author.