The Trials And Misfortunes That Louise Suffer In Her Marriage To Brent

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 her porch awaiting her presumed lover. Song creates the character of the woman to be of a homemaker, describing her duties taking care of laundry, having a cake in the oven and snapping beans in her lap. Through the visualization that Song creates it is assumed that the woman is pregnant, and as she is waiting for her husband she thinks back to the things she herself used to do when she was younger with her own mother. She is reflecting on the way her mother raised her thinking about how she wants to raise her own child. The speaker admits to sneaking in her lover late at night behind her mother’s back, but does not seem to feel remorseful because all her decisions led to where she is in her life now. Cathy Songs poem “The White Porch” portrays the transition of a girl into a woman using symbolism, imagery and simile.

After being crushed with deep sorrow over the death of his beloved Ligeia, the narrator moves into a decaying abbey to leave behind his lonesome house. Although he leaves the exterior of the house untouched, the narrator decorates the interior with strange but lavish furniture. “The furnishings take on the shapes and colors of his fantastic dreams” as he attempts to cope with his loss (Kincheloe). This supports the idea that the narrator would rather live in his own colorful fantasy (like the inside of his house), than engage in the dark reality (as represented by the outside of the house). Losing Ligeia meant the narrator lost his fulfillment in life; which is why his reality is now gloomy and undesirable. Not only does is the furniture an example of dream imagery, the walls of the desolate house also have a dream effect. The moving images on the walls cause the house itself to seem restless and alive. The narrator imagines this because it represents himself; always on the edge of monstrosity with each changing mood. As he hallucinates on opium, his sense of reality and fantasy is put together as one. With each furnishing, a looming memory of Ligeia haunts him as he reminances her during his opium dreams.

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.

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.

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 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.

It is also notable that the protagonist’s room is located at the top of the mansion and was formerly a nursery. At the top of the mansion, she is far away from everyone and everything and can only look out from her barred window. This is similar to the tale of Rapunzel, a girl trapped in a tower with no one to communicate with. The narrator’s room being a former nursery and playroom may also give insight to John’s attitude towards her, in that he sees her as a child that needs to be pacified and doted on rather than a grown woman that can make her own choices about her illness and its treatment. The yellow wallpaper that decorates the room is what catches the narrator’s eye, as she finds it unbearably

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.

       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 slight amount of joy when she believes that he is dead. Despite the love between husband and wife, Louise views Brently’s death as an escape from the oppression of marriage. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” your standard nineteenth-century middle-class marriage, with its rigid distinction between the “domestic” functions of the housewife and the “active” work of the working husband, ensured that women remained second-class citizens. The story shows that this division of

The atmosphere of this exposition is clearly foreboding: "the dark clouds, broken chimneys, unused street, solitary cat, and dead air" all prove ominous and reflect the sordid ruling mood. Failed culture and solitary of aimless women ("a cat moved itself in and out of railing") not knowing exactly what to do about their predicaments in which

This imagery includes “splinters, / And boards torn up, / And places with no carpet on the floor” (4-6). The character’s language paints a very real picture of an old and dangerous stairway that provides little in the way of support and is constantly threatening harm. The details such as splinters force one to think of sudden sharp pains in unexpected places while the torn up boards introduce ideas of sudden instability and lean times. The road of life has not been full of comfort either, as the carpet is thin or even missing from entire segments, but still the older woman continued to climb, “And reachin’ landin’s, / And turnin’ corners, / And sometimes goin’ in the dark” (10-12). The life depicted thus provides few safe havens in the form of ‘landin’s’, if all the boards are in place, but more frequently prove difficult in their own way as they introduce corners and sections that must be navigated completely in ignorance. Picturing trying to climb this twisting stairway, it is easy to see how this life has been littered with all kinds of difficult trials and tribulations, but also sprinkled with comfort in the idea that the floor was covered with carpet sometimes and rest in the concept that she came across landings sometimes.

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

Contrast to a crystal stair, the mother climbs the stairs with boards that are torn up. In life, not only is it hazardous for a person to climb a staircase with boards that are torn up but also very deadly. There are usually yellow cautions signs to warn people to avoid such stairways. But the mother has no such pleasure because she has to climb such stairs in order to endure in her already troubled life. For example, although it was dark, and dangerous to be out, the mother does not have a choice of not going to work because she must work to pay her bills. The tacks, the splinters, the torn up boards, all are used to relate the hardships of the mother's life to the hard times of climbing up tattered stairs.

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.