Week 5

The Yellow Wallpaper

I really enjoyed reading "The Yellow Wallpaper" written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  This story kept be quite entertained. Usually I am counting down the pages to the end and with this story I was shocked it was already over.  I feel very sorry for the lady in the story.  Her husband John thinks she is very ill.  I think maybe she had some sort of post pardon depression from having their baby.  Because John thinks she is so ill she must remain upstairs in her room. 

    She cannot stand the yellow wallpaper in that room.  It's a horrible shade of yellow, it's very old and musky smelling.  Eventually I think she starts really going crazy.  Her brother also a Physician agrees with her husband.  I think if everyone thought I was crazy I would probably really go crazy.  Day after day she just sits on her bed. Eventually she starts to imagine a woman trying to get out of the wallpaper behind bars.  I think this signifies her  own life as she is always trying to escape her room which she is ordered to stay in. She is wishing to go out in the garden and breathe fresh air.  She expresses her wishes to write in her journal and suggests ways to improve her health and each time she is shot down by her controlling husband.   I think in this writing she is describing how she felt as a child always being sick and being told what to do by her parents.  I was really expecting more of a true horror story not a depressing one. I guess in the say and age that she wrote it, they had less understanding about depression being a sickness and better ways to treat it. In the end she works and works at tearing down as much paper as she can.  She is seen by her husband running around and around the room. At this point I think she has truly lost it.

The Awakening

The  "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin was a sad story to me.  I think Edna Pontelliers was constantly searching for something she couldn't have. Sort of the grass is always greener on the other side.  She was a married woman  with children living the life of the upper class.  While most would be content living that sort of life she was not.  She never seemed very motherly compared to her friend Adele Ratignolle.  

     Chopin wrote this story in 1899.  This was a time when men where the money earners and the woman was to stay home with her children.  She was the cook, cleaner, caretaker.  I don't think Edna ever wanted that in her life.  She often had images of the bluegrass fields in Kentucky as a child and of the ocean at Grand Isle in the Gulf Of Mexico. This was an escape from reality for her. She did not want to bother with her children and taking care of them.  Her husband noticed this too.  She felt trapped as the birds in the cage were trapped. Her friend Adele Ratignolle is complete opposite. She is very motherly to her children and tries to guide her the right way. She begs Edna to think of her children before leaving her husband.  Edna could not do it though. She leaves her husband gets her own apartment, gets a job selling her paintings.  She is living the life she wishes.  Her lover Robert ends up leaving her behind because he doesn't believe they can overcome the the marriage she has.  She is very sad and depressed.  She swims out to sea and swims and swims and eventually just gives up on her life. I think if she had been born at a later time she may have been successful but she could not compete with the role of wife and mother expected during that time of life.