Edward Hopper's 'The Woman In The Sun'

The air is tainted with the fumes of cherry blossom, hairspray and “Scarlet” red nail polish. Pink and white paint add texture to the walls. Week old clothes begin to hide underneath the solitary wooden mahogany chair as new, fresh clothes take their place as head of the drawer. Pieces of pencil shavings cover the once pastel pink carpet while the white fan creaks once it hits a 180-degree angle. A battle between bright yellow and soft white light occurs when someone decides to take settle on the full- size bed.

Trapped in the upstairs of an old mansion with barred windows and disturbing yellow colored wallpaper, the main character is ordered by her husband, a physician, to stay in bed and isolate her mind from any outside wandering thoughts. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, describes the digression of the narrator’s mental state as she suffers from a form of depression. As the story progresses, the hatred she gains for the wallpaper amplifies and her thoughts begin to alter her perception of the room around her. The wallpaper serves as a symbol that mimics the narrator’s trapped and suffering mental state while she slips away from sanity reinforcing the argument that something as simple as wallpaper can completely

In The novel The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, Men are portrayed to be good loving beings who only want to be loved in turn and that women use men for their own gain, enjoyment, and pleasure, but in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Women are portrayed to be good beings who want to love and be loved, and men are the horrid ones who use women for their own pleasure and gain. Hemingway shows in his novel, men are true in their love by example of Jake’s love for Brett, and that women are horrid through Brett who only has flings with men and then leaves. While Austen shows women truly love through Jane and Elizabeth, and that men are horrid through Darcy and Bingley. Each author has a completely different view as to what love is, and

She has been confined to the former nursery in her family's colonial mansion to cure her of hysterical tendencies, a medical condition she was diagnosed with after the birth of her son (Gilman 1997: 1f.). The woman confides in her secret journal how her contact with the outside world has become strictly limited on account of her Doctor's recommendations, and how the treatment forces her to spend her days in a barely furnished room with only her own mind and the objects around her as companions (Gilman 1997: 1f.). One of the main objects she actively engages with during this period of isolation, other than the nailed down bed and her secret journal, is the old yellow wallpaper covering the walls around her (Gilman 1997: 1f.). While the woman's condition worsens gradually over the course of the entries she makes in her secret journal, her growing isolation and inactivity make her start to see movement in the patterns and holes of the old wallpaper (Teichler 1984: 61, Gilman 1997: 1f.). The character becomes absorbed by what she thinks she sees, and begins to directly interact with the things she sees in the paper, until she rips the paper to shreds, and violently frees what she sees, and subsequently, also herself from captivity (Teichler 1984: 61, Gilman 1997:

Instructed to abandon her intellectual life and avoid stimulating company, she sinks into a still-deeper depression invisible to her husband, which is also her doctor, who believes he knows what is best for her. Alone in the yellow-wallpapered nursery of a rented house, she descends into madness. Everyday she keeps looking at the torn yellow wallpaper. While there, she is forbidden to write in her journal, as it indulges her imagination, which is not in accordance with her husband's wishes. Despite this, the narrator makes entries in the journal whenever she has the opportunity. Through these entries we learn of her obsession with the wallpaper in her bedroom. She is enthralled with it and studies the paper for hours. She thinks she sees a woman trapped behind the pattern in the paper. The story reaches its climax when her husband must force his way into the bedroom, only to find that his wife has pulled the paper off the wall and is crawling around the perimeter of the room.

Out of all the characters in A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, there are two main ones that influence the plot. Mama and Walter impact the plot the most because both characters have different perspectives and their actions significantly shape the plot.

In Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun” (1959), she reveals the life of the Youngers family. In doing so, there surfaces a detrimental ideology that destroys the family financially and in their overall happiness. In Act II Scene I, Walter, the father figure of the family, says, “Why? You want to know why? 'Cause we all tied up in a race of people that don 't know how to do nothing but moan, pray and have babies!” (Hansberry 532). By way of explanation, the family and much of the African-American community for the 1960’s, is built upon a loose ideology that is a brutal cycle that infects the lives of those who inhabit the area; tired of all the commotion from the Caucasians who, to them, miraculously achieve a life of ruling and

Contrary to popular belief and everything anyone thought they knew about our planet, no one really knows how the giant mass of rock beneath our feet came to be. There have been multiple “Gods” thought to have built the earth with their bare hands alone, which is correct to a degree,

Author Charlotte P. Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a complex short story that discusses the thoughts and feelings of a woman who is kept confined in a small upstairs bedroom by her husband. The woman suffers from depression and anxiety, yet her spouse whom is a physician claims that she is not terribly ill. Despite all the strange thoughts she acquires, she continues to force herself to accept her new life style and awkward place of living. As she comes to find herself overwhelmed with her personal bedroom, we soon discover that the room’s yellow wallpaper is what affects her directly and is the reason for her many interpretations. The symbols in the story take a great part in the overall plot and

Her husband keeps wants her to put down her pen and paper, relax and stay in one room as she is stressed. The doctor and her husband agree that this is the best cure for her depression or mental anguish. All though not really on board with this plan, as she wants to live, she goes along with her doctor and husband’s blessing, holding her feelings inside “But John says if I feel so, I shall neglect proper self-control; so I take pains to control myself—before him, at least, and that makes me very tired” (Gilman, par. 26). In her husband holding her to this room, which has torn yellow wallpaper, she fades more and more into the faded torn walls “I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wall-paper. It dwells in my mind so” (Gilman, 94). She wants to get to any other room for the longest time, then subsides into blending into the wallpaper and what it possesses in its designs. Eventually, her husband went checking on her, found her creeping around on the floor, and was so astonished that she actually digressed that he

"A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorraine Hansberry is about a family who going through different kind of problems. Walter Lee Younger from the story went through the most trouble. Like most people, they have a dream and want that dream to come through. Walter Lee is not different from any other ordinary person who have dreams. Walter Lee chases his dream, goes through selfishness/frustration, and changes of a lifetime.

There is no doubt that Lorraine Hansberry uses her play, A Raisin in the Sun, as a platform to give her opinions and observations on the black community and of the racism they faced in the mid-1900s. Her play is filled with commentary

In Lorraine Hansberry’s play “Raisin in the Sun” many of the characters struggle to achieve their dreams and often have them deferred due to race and gender. In the play, an African American family must learn how to live in a time period where racial segregation and gender inequality is normal and obvious. In the 1900s, men saw women as less superior. In Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem”, it explains how dreams are deferred when it comes to the African American population. Hughes writes: “Does it dry up, /like a raisin in the sun?”(2-3). Hughes and Hansberry want to let everyone know the hardship African Americans dealt with and that at often times, their dreams were deferred. Racism made it difficult for some African American families to make

In the realistic fiction play, “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry, Beneatha evolves greatly. The play is about a poor African American family living on the south side of Chicago. One day they receive a check for ten thousand dollars because of Walter seniors death. Lena’s children, Walter and Beneatha, both have there own plans for how to use the money. Walter wants to use the money to open a liquor store, and Beneatha wants to use the money to go to medical school. Of course, Lena also has her own plans. She wants to buy a new house and support Beneatha’s education. Beneatha is a well educated black woman who initially was obnoxious. Eventually she is determined and as the play is coming to an end, she becomes much more mature.

Throughout both works of art I continued to question, can truth be personal, or is it strictly objective? In “A Woman in the Sun,” the viewer has no reason to believe that the room is painted as anything other than it was that very day. When first reading that the woman is in fact seventy-eight, the audience may feel deceived; however, reading the words “Hopper transformed her . . . according to his own internal vision rather” (Whitney Museum of American Art), a feeling of relief appears. It is clear that this painting is Hopper's truth, even though it would not be our own. Similar to O’Brien’s anecdote of Lemon’s death: “and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must’ve thought it was the sunlight that was killing him. It was