Zoey Crain Comp 1302 Prof. Dodge February 9, 2012 The Yellow Wallpaper The psychological thriller, The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a short story about a woman with postpartum depression. The narrator’s husband and brother concluded it was a nervous depression. Her husband and she move out to a rather suspicious house, so she can better herself. She isn’t aloud to do any kind of work and is given strict instructions to get air and relax her self.
The ugliness of the yellow wallpaper can be compared to the ugliness of her life at the time of the story, the way her husband doubts her illness and her not being able to break free from his grip. The nursery symbolizes how women were seen on the same level as children. A woman’s role during this time was one of confinement and the barred windows are symbols of this. The narrator tearing down the yellow wallpaper to find the woman represents her attempt to regain her sanity. The wallpaper is her confinement and by tearing it down she frees herself.
The two short stories show how two women have felt trapped due to their situations. In The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the woman is portrayed to have an illness and trapped in a room by her husband in order to get better. In A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, Emily's father has overprotected her denying her a normal life. When he dies she is left with no one guiding her and she decides to trap herself in her house. In the two short stories, both women feel repressed in their role unwillingly to escape their room leaving them to have a distorted reality created by their mind.
Billy’s social control agent starts out to be his mother. Billy dreads what his dominating mother thinks of him. Billy’s mother also broke off the engagement to Billy’s fiancée because she thought that the girl was beneath him. This returned the social control of Billy back to his mother. When Billy has sex with a girl, Candy, at the ward, Nurse Ratched confronts Billy.
“… Who was it that wrote to the chemist saying his wife was a prostitute? And who was it that gave the lollipop man a nervous breakdown?” We also learn that the ‘kiddy’ has died of Leukemia and that the ‘couple opposite’ were actually going to visit him in the hospital every night. She then is given a suspended sentence and has to get regular visits from social workers, both of whom Miss Ruddock doesn’t like. You would think Miss Ruddock would redeem herself, instead Miss Ruddock continues to write letters this time to report the policeman whom she thinks is having an affair with the woman in ‘no. 56’.
Glass Kristina Snow is suffering from an addiction to meth and she struggles with it until she gives in and the “monster,” as she refers to it, takes her under again and she slowly loses everything, including her family and her baby. The book ends with her and her boyfriend being thrown into jail for possession, transportation, and intent to distribute meth. She also finds out she is pregnant with his baby. The tone the author uses for Kr.istina’s voice is very scattered from the beginning, when she is suffering from withdrawal, when she is high, and when she is crashing by the end of the novel. Glass is the 2nd novel in the Crank trilogy by Ellen Hopkins.
Many events in the book were very sad and touching when Foster the main girl in the story keeps a pillow case just with her dads stuff in there after he died in the army, she lives with her mom and her boyfriend named Huck who isn’t as nice to Foster at most times making her call him Elvis thinking of himself as a really good singer making Fosters mom the backstage singer and some days he even hits her mom at times and finally one day they get into a fight making Huck break into their house and hitting her mom so badly that they have to run away from their house very fast finding a safe place with Huck coming behind them with his car chasing them and soon they outrun him and arrive to West Virginia. Foster a 12 year old girl with a huge love for baking can bake almost anything possible to bake but she only has one problem she can’t read at all when she starts “it’s like my brain starts to close
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is a novel about an African American woman named Janie and her struggle to find true love and meaning in her life. While Janie is the main character, her Grandmother Nanny is the person who sets Janie on her life’s journey to find happiness. However, Nanny’s decisions were based on her slave ideals and were not what Janie desired for her own life. As a former slave, Nanny had been raped by her white master and gave birth to her daughter who became Janie’s mom. When the white master is sent off to war, his jealous wife threatens to whip Nanny and to sell off her baby.
The wallpaper demonstrates the women of that time, as Gilman explains, “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one…And she is all the time trying to climb through”(789). Once again, the oppression of a women being trapped inside bars is a symbol of her husband keeping her away from everything and everyone, while the many women or the many heads she sees representing the women of the Victorian time trying to escape from society. Considering her illness, the narrator has worsened throughout the days she is in the room. She’s convinced that she is also one of the women trapped in the wallpaper, and that she has luckily gotten out before them (791). The wallpaper gave the narrator faith that she could be released from the cage that she was in and to not be trapped inside like the women she sees within the paper, yet not knowing that her condition has only gotten
Analytical paper # 2 Due: October 24, 2012 “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the story of a young woman whose creative appeal and self-expression are suppressed by her society and her marriage. The short story is told by the narrator through her diary, which she describes as an exemption of her thoughts. The narrator is apparently artistic and creative as can be seen through her animated descriptions of the house her husband John has rented. The narrator includes representations of the yellow wallpaper in the upstairs nursery where she and her husband sleep at night. The wallpaper is used characterically to reflect the marriage the narrator finds herself ambushed inside.