Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is preoccupied above all with the secret and mysterious life of things. It’s concerned with the human and the non-human, and the surprisingly porous line between them. The narrator takes for granted that things have what she terms “expression.” Her only surprise is that, in the circumstances in which she finds herself, they turn out to be more alive than ever: “I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have!” (3). Yet immediately after declaring that the liveliness of things is an open secret, that “we all know” that they have expression, she backtracks somewhat by suggesting that perhaps she is more attentive to their mysterious vitality than most: “I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store” (3). In part, then, the plot turns on this uncertainty: is the narrator a special case, abnormal, perhaps insane? Or is she simply telling us something we all know, to some extent or another: that things are more like us and we are more like things than we care to admit. Then there is a third possibility: that the “we” she invokes is general but not universal. It may be that there are some, particularly women, who can sympathize with things and know what it is to be treated as a thing. And that there are others, above all men, whose sense of subjectivity depends on marking (exaggerating?) their difference from things, and on asserting their superiority over the objects around them.

From the outset of the story, the narrator has a sense that things are not quite right. The house that she and her husband are to rent for the summer is, she intuits, perhaps “haunted”–though she doesn’t want to say this outright, for fear she may be accused of “romantic felicity” (1). Is this her (supposed) problem, that she is too much of a romantic, too easily affected by her surroundings? Still, she “proudly” insists, as though to defy any such insinuations, that there is “something queer” about the place. But by contrast, her husband John won’t admit to any such intimation: he is “practical in the extreme [. . .] and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures” (1). But is his problem perhaps that he in fact takes too little interest in what can be “felt and seen.” For we soon observe that the narrator focuses intently on the sensible, on her senses and sensation. For all her misgivings, she eagerly describes the house, for instance, and describes its garden as “delicious,” as though she could physically taste it. Her conviction that there is “something strange” is confirmed by her senses: “I can feel it.” Her husbands responds that what she “felt was a draught, and shut the window” (1). So begins the confinement.

Encouraged to rest, forbidden from working or writing, stuck in a room with barred windows at the top of the house, the narrator becomes obsessed with the wallpaper that lines the limits of her seclusion. It provokes, from the start, intense feelings: “I never saw a worse paper in my life. [. . .] The color is repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow” (2). But equally, from the start, it is described as though it had a strange (if self-destructive) will of its own: its “lame uncertain curves [. . .] suddenly commit suicide–plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions” (2). Over time, the narrator elaborates on the contradictions that she perceives in the paper, perceiving faintly “a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one, for you can only see it in certain lights, and not clearly then” (3). Eventually, she comes to conclude that “it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about the pattern. I don’t like it a bit” (5). And ultimately, the tensions in her own situation, that of a frustrated woman writer, hemmed in at all sides by a husband who dismisses her sensations as hysteria, come to parallel and merge with the strains that she perceives in the patterns around her. She tears at the paper, grasping at the presence she perceives within it: “I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled” (8).

None of this is really about identification. The narrator has written herself into her surroundings, which in turn have opened up to her. It’s best to think of this as a production–better still, a co-production–of an expansive subjectivity immanent to the things of this world. Against the authoritative (and authoritarian) airs of her doctor husband, the narrator makes the whole world tremble and vibrate. And in the end, her particularity, her singularity, affects him, too, when he falls down in a faint upon entering the room that she has made her own by abolishing the distance between subject and object, human and inhuman. She has become part of it, and it finally becomes her.

I began The Yellow Wallpaper slightly confused. I was trying to figure out what exactly was making her sick, and had initially come to the assumption that it was depression. But as things progressed it quickly became something more like schizophrenia, as she was seeing these women “creeping” around her from this wallpaper. I was trying to solve a sort of puzzle as I read, picking up pieces of clues as to what it was she had. But post-reading, that felt not quite right to me, so I reread it. The madness that she has at the end of the story isn’t something she had all along, it’s something she’s driven into. Her husband seemed to want the best for her, but the strict guidelines he forces her to follow, hoping they will help her, are in fact was drive her into insanity it seems. I found the progression of her becoming more and more paranoid and obsessed with the wallpaper actually quite incredible, and subtly well done. On a side-note, I read this on a train at night and was actually a little bit freaked out, as my imagination got the better of me as I was reading the final page with all the “creeping women” outside her window. Looking out the window into this dark forest rushing by… seemed like the perfect place for creeping. Maybe I’ve just seen too many ghost stories. Anyway, I was quite fond of the story and all it’s delicacies.

            The Metamorphosis also had me slightly confused at the beginning… and also slightly bored. I got into later, but it was a slightly slow start. I was trying to figure out what was going on, if he was a human-sized or small insect, what type of insect he was, and if he could talk or not. I had heard he was a cockroach, so that’s how I pictured him, but the story never explicitly says. Relating to the yellow wallpaper, this transition is also very subtle and well done. Though George is quite suddenly and inexplicably turned into an insect, he slowly changes from a very human bug to a very buggy… bug. He clings to his humanity, but looses it in many aspects. There is a moment when he wants his furniture removed to allow for crawling about, but quickly feels a great sense of panic about letting go of these objects which tie him to his old self. But at the end we see a very significant change in him when he hears his sister’s music again. He once thought of her and wanted to send her to music school, but at the end he merely wants her to stay with him always, and play for him alone. He stills seems human because of the way his thoughts are presented, and is certainly not at all the same person he was at the beginning. He seems to stay the same as we are with his thoughts most of the story, but at the same time changes greatly.

Hope everyone had a great reading week, see you tomorrow!

I tend to be a rather direct disliking absurd or strange ways of writing that deviate from convention.  However, I did admire the Yellow Wallpaper and The Metamorphosis and I actually quite like The Metamorphosis.

The major reason i liked The Metamorphosis was that the dialogue in the Metamorphosis most resembled some of the plays I studied when I was still in IB Theatre arts, these were called absurd plays, where the dialogue was repetitive, the characters said the opposite of what they meant, or their phrases cliched or just so absurd and confused that it sounds like no normal human being would say anything that way.  The Metamorphosis sort of resembled that type of story.  it was about a group of characters thrust into a really absurd situation, in which one of them in for without any reason at all, changed into a monster.  Hence I actually found the ways they tried to cope with Gregor quite understandable, as crazy or absurd as they were.

The Yellow Wallpaper, was very image rich for such a short story.  Visual and sensory imagery were prone in this story and I noticed a lot of synaesthesia as well… a condition that possibly points to Gilman’s earlier madness.  I did find this a rather disturbing tale though and a very convincing depiction of madness.  Apart from that, I am actually not quite sure what to think about the Yellow Wallpaper…

This weeks essays are going to be really interesting for sure…  Poems, absurd stories, a short story about madness… hmm…

People show their true selves not in ordinary, but extraordinary circumstances. We spend our lives studying the way we should think and the way we should act based on the context of our daily routines, and it is only when that routine is shattered that we can take a good look in mirror and tell exactly what kind of people we are. That is the case here. Gregor Samsa, a man whose daily routine consists of going to work and providing for his family, finds that he is suddenly unable to do so—and this doesn’t happen in an ordinary way. He isn’t fired, he doesn’t decide to quit, he isn’t caught in road rage, he doesn’t get food poisoning; of all things, he turns into a bug. He wakes up from a nightmare into a nightmare, and one so surreal that it takes a while for him to recognize his new reality. His daily routine his shattered, and with it, his hope for the future. He can no longer pay off his family’s debt, no longer court that woman he had a crush on, and most importantly to him, no longer be able to enroll his sister into music school. Now, he becomes utterly dependent on his family instead of the other way around. He spends his days amusing himself by crawling around his room—which begins to lose its furniture—and eats rotten food that he would before never have touched. Has he adapted? Has his extraordinary circumstance transformed into the ordinary? The story does not last long enough for us to know, as in the end, Gregor simply…dies. We are cut off from the climax that we wanted—regardless of what that climax might entail—and are instead given an anticlimax. The question remains, then: When Gregor Samsa looks into the mirror, what does he see?

Although Gregor’s story ends in an anticlimax, his family’s certainly doesn’t. We know exactly what the true form of his family is—it is, in every way, shape, and form, that of ordinary people. His family may not consist of saints, but neither do they consist of monsters. They were faced with the shocking nightmare of their son/brother and sole breadwinner turning into a cockroach, but instead of killing it outright, they kept it alive with the belief that it was still Gregor (was it?). They fed it and took care of it with great effort and despite the revulsion they felt at seeing it, and the sister in particular, recalling her love for her brother, worked the hardest of them all. They, too, adapted to their circumstance, in one way but not in another. They got their savings together, fired some servants to save money, and began taking jobs to make ends meet. Their daily lives of idleness transformed into daily lives of work, and in this relatively ironic fashion, they themselves transformed from human parasites into productive citizens. One part of their circumstances remained extraordinary, however; namely, that of the bug. They kept the bug, but they never got used to it—sister, mother, and father all remained repulsed, and it was only in the tolerance of their “good will” that they allowed it to remain. Just as time washes away pain, however, it washes away affection. The more they worked, the more their memory of Gregor faded, and eventually, they believed that they had “done enough”. They had put up with this extraordinary circumstance for long enough, and it was time to return to their daily lives. And they did. The bug died, the cleaning woman disposed of it, and they all simultaneously took a day off from work (a return to the old days of idleness) in order to discuss the future. They found out that their daily lives were actually going good. All of their jobs were steady, and the daughter was approaching the age for marriage—they were just thinking about ordinary things like ordinary people, and in their ordinary minds, Gregor was nothing more than a distant memory.

I’ve read the Yellow Wallpaper many times before and each time reading it has been interesting. The protagonist’s thoughts and actions show the reader that it was possible for her illness – I assume she was depressed after giving birth to her child – to be cured or even helped. However, at that time, medicine did not allow for psychological illnesses to be considered ‘real illnesses’ and that is why her husband John does not truly believe himself that she is really as ill as she claims. John is an extremely unlikeable character in this short story. Whenever she wants company he says having “society and stimulus” would be bad for her and yet that is exactly what she needs at this point instead of being stuck in a hideous room. This short story also deals with the view of mental illness in the 1890’s – the protagonists husband refuses to accept the fact that she might be actually ill and not just suffering from some nervous disorder.

Franz Kafka’s “the Metamorphosis” was a short story I’d heard about many times. I read his other short story “The Hunger Artist” in high school and I found it weird and compelling and sad all at the same time. “Metamorphosis” was an extremely compelling short story. Having an ordinary middle class man suddenly turn into a cockroach (beetle? insect?) is surprising and strange. There is no explanation given for this transformation, nothing out of the ordinary happened to him and yet he suddenly just turned into a cockroach. Sometimes there doesn’t have to always be a reason for a short story to come about, it could be that just simply one morning he woke up a creature which he was not before and there’s simply nothing anyone can do about it. Kafka’s story-telling abilities are astounding in this story, I ended up feeling miserable while reading the story even though I hate insects and found the idea ridiculous to begin with. There’s nothing happy about this story – no happy ending, no idea of a better tomorrow nothing to give one hope and I think that sometimes with a story like this you kind of see reality because there aren’t always good endings there are just things which happen and sometimes you really can’t do anything about them.

I had heard of Kafka once before, in Prague on a walking tour where there is a statue representing one of his other books in honor of him. I had forgotten the name of Kafka and just remembered the story. Thanks to Juliana and her blog, I have a different spin on this.

I had trouble with this story; the very apparent lack of actual love expressed to Gregor was fairly appalling considering he lived in such misery for his family’s survival disgusted me. At the end, as the family relaxes in the car thinking of how they see their life now that he is dead, they seem more grateful for his death rather than his sacrifice. I say sacrifice because, unlike Gregor’s father who says “what a life. So this is the peace of my old age.”(p.41) Gregor worked hard and never experienced old age. He wished little other than to be free of the bonds to the employer, to have his parents be happy, and to send his sister to the conservatory, but died before any of these happened.
When I put down this book after reading it, the thought that popped to my mind was that “I dislike basically every character in this story” which is a very strange feeling. Sure, I sympathize with Gregor, but my interpretation of this story led to me feeling as if none of them were written in a way to be loved by the reader. Also, the characters feel very stagnant or “static” in their personalities, their own “metamorphosis” is rather subtle and in the case of the father, there is really only a change of character when Kafka describes how he was in the past. I did enjoy the amount of details that were adorned to each character, and the relationships and hierarchies that were developed between them (the three tenants, the manager, the cook, etc.) in contrast to the family. However, it is only through those  “outsiders” that the family is put in any view that would make me consider pitying them. The way they are treated by other’s is harsh, while they try to be courteous if not merely passive.
Connected to this train of thought, I had another thought go through my head as to why the story irked me: it feels as if nothing happens. Gregor has transformed into a dung beetle, but has no reaction to this fact other than the stress of being late for work. Thinking about this perspective now though, a lot does happen within the story, but the characters mentalities rarely change when interacting to one another, creating another element to how the story progresses (or feels as if it doesn’t).

I don’t know. This story plays with my mind and I still feel like I don’t really understand it. Hope you all fared better with it than I have.

This past summer, my family and I traversed Eastern Europe for a month. One of our stops was Prague in the Czexh Republic. I’ll never forget when we came across the home of Franz Kafka and my father almost jumped with excitment. I was well aware of who Kafka was, and the fact that he’d written a story, which in my mind, sounded hideous, called The Metamorphisis, but I’d never really given any thought to actually sitting down and reading one of his works until I saw my father’s reaction. When we returned to British Columbia, I grabbed my father’s complete collection of Kafka and began to absorb the words like a sponge. Since then, The Metamorphasis has become one of my all-time favorite pieces. Despite the fact that I have an irrational phobia of all invertebrates, I was completely fascinated with Gregor Samsa’s transformation reflecting his personality. I remember how completely appalled I was by his family’s complete detestation and abandonment of their son, the primary bread winner in the family. It shows just how shallow and petty his family is, how they abuse their own son simply for monetary gain. That last page, where the family is on the train, and Gregor’s mother and father remark at the age of their daughter broke my heart. It shows just how little Gregor’s family cared about him. As soon as he was unable to provide, he was completely outcast. I suppose this speaks volumes about our own society, as we tend to remove people from association once they have lost their use for us. All in all, The Metamorphasis has been the text I have looked forward to reading the most, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it again.

With regards to Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-Paper, this is another piece that I had always heard about, but never read. I was aware of the fact that she sees figures behind the paper, and that in the end, it is actually her who is being constrained and hidden. However, I never really got why the paper was yellow. Upon reading it, I’m still not entirely sure, but I feel as if it may be a reflection upon everything wrong with the society Gilman lived in. Women were still so oppressed, forced into the role of homemaker, as they would be for years to come. The vile, atrocious colour may serve to represent the corruption of such a patriarchal society, how disgusting the world is, and basically everything unpleasant and malodourous in everyday life. As well, the fact that the narrator has no specific name gives the piece a certain universality, making it even more of a feminist piece. Reading The Yellow Wall-Paper in tandem with Kafka’s work show a certain amount of injustice done to the individual in society just because something is abnormal or wrong.

I give up. I’ve tried so hard to fight my internalized spite of poetry, but I can’t change how I feel. The Wasteland is not my cup o’ tea. I like some poetry; I’ve read Plath, Tennyson, Joyce and others with modest enjoyment. There are actually a couple in particular I can recite from heart like some of William Blake’s work. But the poetry I most enjoy I are not the ones that hide in between words and demand a hefty cipher to decode what the poet is trying to convey. In fact I think majority of the supposed “great poets” are just plain lazy. It’s a bold statement, but poetry just seems like an art that requires a greater duty from the reader than the writer. In fact I’d say that poetry is really only proclaimed and valued by those who make claims and connections that aren’t really there. I think the ones that are highly acclaimed just happen to be interpreted well.  And it’s unfair of me because I’m throwing away the meter and rhythm that poetry demands, but it means nothing to me. I honestly can’t hear any pattern when I read most of this stuff. If the Wasteland is one of the greatest poems of the 20^th century than I might as well just abandon it altogether.

I remember a friend once told me how music and art is given such passion by its audience because we’re not appreciating the artist’s work, but rather our own interpretation. Once art is released to the public it’s no longer in sole possession of the artist, it’s everyone’s! This is a very basic concept, but no song has ever been heard in the same way. One song may mean dozens of things to me, but incite many different tones and emotions to another. The song “Lovers In a Dangerous Time” was originally written with simple intentions of conveying the desperation and hopelessness of love in youth before parting ways into adulthood. Yet around the 80s the song was interpreted as a response to the large AIDS outbreak occurring in the decade. Bruce Cockburn didn’t create much; the listeners embellished and transformed it into another piece entirely. Poetry as an art is very similar to this idea.

The thing I dislike the most about poetry is how ambiguous the authors purposely attempt to be. Poetry has always appeared to me as a very personal and secluded act, nearly that of a diary where one can express themselves freely. Yet poetry is published, and the poem becomes a codex, demanding readers to attempt to decipher it, which also requires a biographical account of its author to understand his or her influences and perspectives. Really it attempts to ploy itself as secluded and personal, but when it becomes published it just demonstrates how the author is screaming for attention and readers to investigate into his or her own life. Artists claim to produce art out of a desire to elicit emotions and provoke ideas to their audience, but I think a larger component is a desire to be heard and known. Sounds selfish, but who really isn’t?  I don’t blame em’. Who doesn’t want to be famous, right?

To end my rant on a low note the thing that really pisses me off the most about Eliot’s poetry is his use of other European languages. It just comes off as presumptuous, and he’s not even a citizen of the continent. I’m not impressed you can write a few sentences in other languages, requiring me to translate it.  Good for you Eliot, if anyone pulled that crap in one of our class essays you’d only come off as a total douche. And one of the greatest criticisms of some of my essays is the amount of ambiguity. Common question asked of me is “What is it you mean, what are you trying to say?” Most poets don’t care. Just spit out your vague preachings and let your readers scramble to piece it all together. Whole idea just seems overrated and given too much glorification.

That’s just my very unhumble and biased opinion, so if anyone still wants to talk about Eliot a week later and start a discussion or argument against anything I’ve said, feel free! We’ll start a good old flame war if anyone’s game.

Enjoy the reading week everyone!