In To My Dear and Loving Husband, I feel like the author is writing in an idealistic tone. In other words, she should feel like this for her husband, but simply cannot. Knowing that the author has a strong Puritanical background, it seems that she feels guilty for wanting to be an equal in marriage. She has no social freedom and submits to the ideal case of everlasting, perfect love. I think it's interesting that the first three lines start with the word 'if'. I wonder if this is supposed to suggest that this is a hypothetical situation, or that maybe she would feel this way IF some other conditions were met.
In Prologue, the author is very plainly relating the dominance of men to the less powerful, but slowly progressing, presence of women in society. She relates the wars of captains and kings to the poet's pen. She discusses how women were dismissed, even when they contributed positively to society. In one stanza, she writes:
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits.
A Poet's Pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despise they cast on female wits.
If what I do prove well, it won't advance,
They'll say it's stol'n, or else it was by chance.
She goes on to ask for the smallest amount of acknowledgment and suggests that men and women can freely contribute side by side. She doesn't boast that her work is better than any man's, and even states: This mean and unrefined ore of mine/Will make your glist'ring gold but more to shine. She doesn't want to prove herself better than anybody, she just wants to be able to write freely and be accepted.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a truly interesting story. A woman, essentially ignored by her husband, becomes more and more delusional as she becomes increasingly fascinated by the yellow wallpaper of their bedroom in a rented house. She is aware of the wallpaper's effects on her immediately and rejects it, but becomes obsessed with it as the story progresses. She claims she can't stop examining the wallpaper because when you "follow the lame curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide - plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions." The narrator contradicts herself constantly by talking about how awful everything about the paper is, but then becoming obsessed with it and allowing it to rule her life.
The narrator eventually determines that the pattern on the paper represents bars, trapping women inside who constantly attempt to escape. Ironically, the narrator is fixated on the wallpaper day and night, trapped in a bed that is physically nailed to the floor. Her husband, and all other men in the entire story, constantly remind her that she is mentally unstable and that she should rest constantly. This only pushes the narrator further down the road to insanity by enclosing her in the room with the paper.
The narrator talks about how she would never allow her child to reside in a room with such wallpaper, and she is grateful that she could sacrifice herself. I feel that this is representative of the pressure on women to submit to men and consider all other members of the family before themselves.
She goes on to write that she has begun to lie and conceal her thoughts from her husband and her husbands sister, giving up her ability to speak freely even to the closest people in her life.
She realizes that there is a woman trapped in the wallpaper, the same woman that creeps around the yard and road surrounding the house. At this point the narrator must be totally delusional, but she recognizes the woman's desire for freedom from the wall. The bars in the wallpaper strangle the woman every night, obviously symbolic of male oppression. As the narrator's sanity fades quickly, she decides to lock herself in the room as she has become totally obsessed with it and doesn't want to leave it on their last day in the house. She can finally be freed of the oppressive wallpaper, but she rejects the opportunity as the story comes to a close.
I'm not really sure what happens in the last sentence of the story, or more specifically what it means.
In Rip Van Winkle by Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle sleeps for 20 years and finds himself in the same location, but a very different environment. There is a lot of very plain symbolism. First, Van Winkle falls asleep under British rule and wakes up in post-revolution America. It's hard to look past the concept of freedom, since the British rule was very oppressive and the revolution took place in the name of freedom. Immediately, Van Winkle discovers the price of freedom. His only friends in the village have all been killed in the war, sparing the schoolmaster who is now a member of Congress. Second, Van Winkle's wife is described as a tyrant and when he awakes she has already passed away. Van Winkle was never close to his children, because his wife dominated the household and discouraged his presence. After he wakes up, one of the only people in the village that he can recognize turns out to be his daughter. Finally, I think that the draught/liquor that Van Winkle drinks is the actual catalyst of all the freedom that he obtains. All of the old places in town that Van Winkle used to frequent have since fallen to ruin, but his personal freedom couldn't exist if these portions of his former life were still around.
First of all I love your "I want to Produce Salts with you"
ReplyDeleteI am also a little confused about what happens to the wife at the end of "The Yellow Wallpaper." The husband fainted so obviously she was in some distorted shape on the floor that shocked him. I assume she finally "cracks" or reaches the worse condition her mental uneasiness or condition. I am unsure if there is a distinct action that ends the scene.