The Yellow Wall-Paper: When she described the room she was in, she mentioned barred windows and the bed being nailed in place. This immediately made me picture some sort of mental hospital, especially because she kept referring to her constant crying and nervousness. But because she was locked in her house and ill, she really depended on her husband. He made sure she took her medicine and told her what activities her body could and could not handle. This goes with what we've been talking about in class. She was so dependent on her male counterpart that her health depended on it.
When I Was Growing Up: One line that stuck out to me was, "...I felt dirty. I thought god made white people clean and no matter how much I bathed, I could not change, I could not shed my skin in the gray water." This sentence just gives me a sense of sadness. It is also interesting that she describes the water as gray, which would imply that it is not even as clean as she believes the white people are. It seems as though a lot of her thoughts of her own race were based off of the environment she grew up in as well as the media and popular culture.
The Thirty Eighth Year: One line that I found interesting was, "in the thirty eighth year of my life, surrounded by life, a perfect picture of blackness blessed, i had not expected this loneliness." This seems like the author has the perfect life to someone from the outside looking in, but does not have the life she wanted for herself and doesn't think she can share her unhappiness. Something else that stood out through the whole poem is the fact that the author never capitalized the letter "i" when talking about herself. This makes her come across as a person with a very low feeling of self worth, and slightly depressed. I think this message was conveyed because women are typically seen as the caregivers of the family and generally put themselves last. The woman's feelings are typically overlooked because things appear to be going well and the woman won't speak up.
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In your post about "The Yellow Wallpaper", you talked about the main character's bedroom looking like a room that should be in a mental institution. What did you think of the author making the main character mentally unstable?
ReplyDeleteI saw it working in two different ways. First, I saw her husband's ignorance in regards to her complaints as a reason that she eventually went crazy. She didn't feel comfortable expressing how she was feeling, so her condition got progressively worse due to the lack of medical attention. This would seem to place the blame on the husband. He failed to take her complaints seriously, which resulted in her changing mental state. It seemed as though men brushing women and their thoughts to the side and women allowing this to occur will eventually result in women losing all control over themselves.
The second way that I read the story was much more negative. I saw a woman who was weak mentally. She was a fragile woman who couldn't fight hard enough against her disease. She couldn't stand up for herself and make anyone around her pay attention to what she was experiencing. She let her husband and her condition overtake her life.
How did you interpret the main character's mental condition? What image of the woman did you have in mind when you finished reading? I was almost mad that she was crazy and had succumbed to what she was dealing with mentally and emotionally.