The Yellow Wallpaper

Every time I reread Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story I find it all the more disturbing. The first person narrator becomes an other, to paraphrase Arthur Rimbaud's famous dictum. She, for the narrator is a woman, assumes the identity of a character whose existence is the product of her own hallucinations. This said, her entire ordeal, which Gilman so skilfully expresses, may also represent the fate of legions of women who were misunderstood, oppressed, and confined to lives of mediocrity and failure by jealous, doting husbands blinded by empiricism and convention. These women, as the female narrator demonstrates, were imprisoned in their own imaginations by the mores of male society which treated them like cherished but rather disobedient children. The narrator lives in a gilded-cage entirely made up of "yellow wallpaper." Her material needs being met, she is left to languish; and any attempt on her part to assert her will is met with 'loving' reproof on the part of her husband. He denies that there is anything physically wrong with her, yet her "malady" persists and even worsens, to the point where his concern for her health turns to anxiety. But her malady is in large measure a psychic reaction to the dehumanizing life she was forced to endure at the hands of a dominant patriarchal social order.

The Story of An Hour - Chopin

Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour" is a flash fiction equivalent of an intellectual and emotional complex. We remember the definition from Ezra Pound's discussion of the 'image.' Chopin characterizes Mrs. Mallard as a feminist who has longed to be free from the "criminal" imposition of a man's will upon her own. The emotions she feels span a wide range. The grief she feels upon learning of her beloved husband's death gives way to the "illumination" that she is now free to live her life as she chooses. But her transcendent joy at discovering a new self is short-lived indeed, lasting about an hour, before she is plunged into despair by the sudden reappearance of Mr. Mallard, and dies from the shock. The character's focalization is internal, i.e. Mrs. Mallard and the reader know more than the other characters in the story (Richards, a friend; Mr. Mallard; Josephine, her sister; the doctor), who mistakenly attribute her death to the "joy" of seeing her husband alive again, rather than to a desperate attempt to escape her fate. The realism of her death--her heart gives way--saves appearances. Her respectability as a wife and mother remains intact in the Victorian society that remembers her.

Greetings

Hello, All. My name is Richard Capozzi and I am registered for this section of English 40. I am an educator on sabbatical. I apologize for missing Wednesday's facetime. I look forward to writing and reading with you all in this online community.