While the narrator recognizes the great care with which her husband is treating her she seems to constantly feel that she is being ungrateful. She calls herself out in her journal for being a “comparative burden” (Gilman) The room in which the narrator resides has a sturdy bed that is nailed to the floor. The narrator notes that there are bars on the windows and rings hooked into the wall. She wrongly assumes that this room was used as a nursery or gymnasium by the previous owners. As the reader, we are able to instill our own thoughts that this room was in fact built to house someone with a mental disorder. This begs the question of what the house really is, to contain such a room away from decent society.
John’s seemingly overwhelming need to ensure she is healthy mentally and physically, drives him to control all aspects of her life. He has his sister come to the mansion to keep an eye on his wife while he’s away in town with his patients. John chose the mansion for its isolation and privacy as he needs to have his wife healthy or it could affect his reputation,. He also picked the nursery as their bedroom as another way to have his wife secluded. The location of the room is on the uppermost level of the house with stairs are gated at the top. There are also bars on the windows as if it is a jail. There is busy ugly peeling yellow wallpaper around the room and they’ve moved in furniture from downstairs. She pleads with John to allow her to stay in the lovely room with veranda on the lower floor. He argues that the nursery with the windows, air and sunlight will be much better for her and he may need a second bed or room for himself. As a compromise, he tells her she could have the cellar whitewashed (239). Either place, the nursery or the cellar, is a prison, which the asylums of the time resembled. John is just containing his wife the only way he knows given his status as a physician. He loves and cares for her and needs her to recover and take care of the family. John is exerting himself by pushing her back into the role she has agreed to by being his
Comparing The Awakening and Story of an Hour The heroine, Mrs. P, has some carries some characteristics parallel to Louise Mallard in “Hour.” The women of her time are limited by cultural convention. Yet, Mrs. P, (like Louise) begins to experience a new freedom of imagination, a zest for life , in the immediate absence of her husband. She realizes, through interior monologues, that she has been held back, that her station in life cannot and will not afford her the kind of freedom to explore freely and openly the emotions that are as much a part of her as they are not a part of Leonce. Here is a primary irony.
Victoria Roubideaux is a seventeen year old girl, who finds out that she is pregnant. She and her mother had a fight in the morning and in the evening, after work, she starts to walk home. “The evening wasn’t cold yet when the girl left the café. But the air was turning sharp with a fall feeling of loneliness coming. Something unaccountable pending in the air.” (31). In that line we see the foreshadowing of her feelings and her mother throwing her out of the house.
At no point in time did the couple attempt to privatize their lifestyle by putting up curtains to cover the window. Seeing as Diane also choose the same position to live with no curtains covering the window as she was younger and now as mother of a three year old child, she can relate to how that lifestyle brought her happiness. The couple’s style of living reminded her of how she used to live to point that they became a symbol of her younger years. After some time, Diane became engrossed with their lives. Their lives grew into a part of her life as her fascination drew her closer; she even picked up on the smaller things in their lives, such as the buying a new pot for plants. In subsequent time, the couple was forgotten over the seven to eight month period of time in which the couple had become absent to their room and only the girl would be seen from time-to-time. Following this, Diane saw a chubby in the room with a skeletal bald man. She came to the conclusion that he was terribly sick and she started to watch the window all the time. Over some time, the man would just be seen lying in bed curled up with his head to the window. He dwindled in size as the days passed and one day, with a notice from her husband, she gained knowledge of activity going on in the couple’s bedroom. She saw that people had gathered around the man in this room to give their goodbyes.
The poem “The White Porch” by Cathy Song is an illustration of maturity and coming of age. There is an innocent tone to the beginning of the poem with sensual undertones as the writing progress’s. In the poem, a woman is reminiscing about her young womanhood as she sits on
For a time, Lucy Gayheart feels the assurance of a bright future reaffirmed daily. And then a tragedy strikes, an undreamed-of turn of events, something which happens every day, and yet which we never address, because it is unthinkable. So will Lucy allow tragedy to beat her down into an existence she has long scorned? Or will she find the mettle to not only endure, but to grow in the face of, her heartbreak? This book was published in 1935. Its syntax can be long-winded, but its imagery is unforgettable. The author conveys a deep love for her fellow man, and for the inexpressible promise of a young life. I believe there is Lucy Gayheart in all of us.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman “The Yellow Wallpaper” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is gothic psychological short story written in journal-style with first-person narrative. Other elements used in the story are symbols, irony, foreshadowing, and imagery. “The Yellow Wallpaper is about a woman who suffers from postpartum depression.
The narrator describes the entire mansion from the hedges to the gates, to the garden as “the most beautiful place ever”. All of it is beautiful except for the bedroom in which she is kept in, but again the room selection was not her choice. “I don’t like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! But John would not hear of it.” The room had previously been a child’s nursery, and had bars on the window. Though she recently had a child, her newborn did not occupy this nursery. The baby was looked after by Johns’ sister, something he had also arranged, and the narrator had very little contact with her child. As the story progresses, the narrator begins to fill more and more trapped by the room and completely obsessed with the “repellent, almost revolting” yellow wallpaper that surrounds her. In many of her secret
The novel begins in the summer of the year 1964. There was a family of three that lived in Wheaton, Illinois. Louise and Tom Spradley found out that they were pregnant with their second child. Bruce, the first child who was three and a half, was diagnosed with German measles. When Louise took Bruce to the doctor not knowing what he was diagnosed with the doctor asked if Louise was pregnant. He began to explain that German measles can cause birth defects but the chances were very little and the baby would be completely normal. This caused Louise to worry about the health of her baby. The family set off to go to California to visit Tom’s Parents. When they were heading to California she noticed she got a rash on her arm. When Louise went to see her old Doctor in L.A, Dr. Anderson could not confirm if she had German measles. She was given a vaccine and told there was only a slim chance any side effects would be shown.
As the tale begins we immediately can sympathize with the repressive plight of the protagonist. Her romantic imagination is obvious as she describes the "hereditary estate" (Gilman, Wallpaper 170) or the "haunted house" (170) as she would like it to be. She tells us of her husband, John, who "scoffs" (170) at her romantic sentiments and is "practical to the extreme" (170). However, in a time
In both stories, women are portrayed as unable to live their own lives or take care of themselves. It also indicates that women are constantly oppressed in marriage. In “A Story of an Hour” Louise, who already knows that her husband was a kind and loving soul, nonetheless feels a
Although these are “homely” things someone may face on a staircase, they actually mean things that she has encountered in her life (Emanuel 148). She says that she reaches landings, which means that she has come up on place where she could rest. When she says she turns corners, it is when her life changes and she has to turn away from her original path. Her final comparison is when she goes in the dark, which are times in her life when she does not know what she can do to help herself. The metaphors in this poem show a conflict in the mother’s life and makes the poem seem complete.
The story wasn’t all that visual till Louise went to grieve for the loss of her husband on her own. The visual from the street, and of the sky, and also the section of the house that was their bedroom was pretty vivid. She’s completely hysterical in front of her sister, but when she thinks it over alone in her room she feels free from the oppression of having a husband just like in the “New England Nun”. I like how Brantley’s friend Richard thinks his being the kind good friend for telling his wife her husband died, but instead he tells her sister and she tells her for him. My favorite part was the ending I thought the irony there was spot on she was over joyed when he died, but he was never really dead so when he came in he basically scare
The role of African American literature in recent years has been to illuminate for the modern world the sophistication and beauty inherent in their culture as well as the constant struggle they experience in the oppressive American system. When writers such as Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois and Alice Walker