Blank, dead eyes stared at the blank death like white walls, the pills had done their job. Lucille Chaleau was now like every other person in the glorified purgatory, Marie de Médicis Asylum. Her mind wobbled unsteady in her convulsing body, her vision became blurred, everything went black. It was simply another 6:30 p.m. With the sun’s rise screams pierced the air, jolting Lucille from her medicated coma like slumber.…
Through reading “The Woman Upstairs”, Claire Messud creates the character of Nora Eldridge, an angry, self-aware narrator, who works to educate the reader on the choices and confines of being a woman and over all the female experience that is focused on a particular life stage. In my opinion, it would be difficult to write an accurate female experience without divulging into perceivable sexist stereotypes that are predominant in the culture today. Expanding on that, can we read Claire Messud’s work as a feminist, on the basis that she defies these stereotypical norms, or is she just another angry woman whose life has become a stalemate. Readers may consider her a feminist in the aspect that she rejects stereotypical norms of setting down fast…
Comparative Essay The Yellow Wallpaper and The Story of an Hour both focus on themes of women in marriages feeling trapped and suffocated, while showing the effects of illnesses that become more pronounced through the relations to their respective spouses. Through personal observations and narratives the two wives in both stories express similar relations to both of their husbands, which is internal toleration. “And yet she had loved him-Sometimes. Often she had not” (SH).…
Imagine having to stay in a room for a couple months. In addition to that, picture having little to none human contact. The room is locked from the outside and has barred windows. It is extremely bare, except for the bed. The only thing to keep you company is this horrid, yellow wallpaper.…
Within the story “A Sorrowful Woman,” Gail Godwin weaves a tale that tells the story of an intriguing family that likely seems normal on the surface, but within has deep issues. The story ultimately ends with the unfortunate death of the protagonist, with the death being surrounded in mystery. Ultimately, the wife’s death comes down to her sickness being incurable and her needing to have some control of what was going on within her life. When the wife is initially sick, it isn’t very clear as to what could make her as physically sick as she was. Simply looking at her child should not be enough to make anyone physically sick.…
Before the Women’s Rights Movement, women were subjected to the wants and needs of their husbands. Socially, women staying at home and doing what their husbands wanted was considered the societal norm. However, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some women used writing literature as a voice to show the social injustices brought against women. As more women began to voice their opinions, they were able to start changing the way that they were viewed. Some of these women include the author of “Sweat,” Zora Neale Hurston; the author of “The Story of an Hour,” by Kate Chopin; and the author of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.…
Social Class and Trauma The film depicts the differences between social classes and their response to a traumatic event. Typically, upper class individuals feel protected within their environment, whereas, lower class individuals are more susceptible to outside influences. The Headless Woman portrays these differences quite clearly. During the opening scene children of the upper class are seen playing in and around Vero’s car as the parents stand by. In film, cars are seen as a form of protection.…
The role of women in society has changed drastically over the centuries. Women went from being subordinate to their husbands to having the right to not only live their lives freely but have minds of their own. In the stories “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The story of an Hour” both authors use a historical setting to show the place that women had in society. Both authors suggest that a women can feel trapped in her marriage and lose her sense of self. In the story the “Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator who was unamed felt so trapped by her husband that she was drove deeper and deeper into insanity.…
This movie deals with the identity of being Native American and how Hollywood has been a double-edged sword in its portrayals of Natives. The movie starts off as showing how Native Americans were more the “background” of the movies throughout America’s history.…
1.What psychological stages does the narrator go through as the story progresses? The narrator goes through a rollercoaster of emotion throughout this story. In the beginning of the story she is suffering from postpartum depression so her husband locks her away in the attic. Being bored out of her mind and stuck in the room for 3 months she starts to be intrigued by the specific most minor details of the room like the pattern of the yellow wallpaper.…
Often, Haruki Marukami’s short stories are one-sided and only demonstrate one side to gender representations. Most of Marukami’s fictional stories exemplify patriarchy in Japan, during which his female characters are positioned as objects for the subjectivity of males. The women used in Murakami ‘sworks are not empowered by feministic views; thus, the female subjects do not stand up for their own well-being. Throughout Haruki Marukami’s stories, female characters are used to represent the realities that several females faced in contemporary Japan, such as: isolation and seclusion, contradictive feminism, and fierce violence. This is evident in Marukami’s…
Yet using the word “climb” the narrator implies that the woman is trying to escape and overcome the obstacles in front of her, similar to the narrator who wishes to have more freedom in her own life. An option the narrators thinks of to regain her freedom is: “to jump out of the window…, but the bars are too strong to even try”(179). The narrator is so desperate to escape from the constricting life she lives, that she thinks about committing suicide, but the room is dictated to live in discourages her idea. At this point in the story, John controls almost every aspect of the narrator’s life, so she looks for any way to regain control of her life. The woman she sees behind the wallpaper reminds her how trapped and isolated she is, and therefore by freeing the woman, she can also free herself.…
36. Esperanza and Mamacita both do not like their houses. In order to solve the problem about Mamacita not liking her house she choses to not do anything about it. Instead she sits in her window of her house and whines. “She sits all day by the window and plays the Spanish radio show and sings all the homesick songs about her country in a voice that sounds like a seagull.”…
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an advocate for women, who believed that they should be on the same level as men economically, socially, and politically. This was very forward thinking for the late 1800s to early 1900s. Gilman often used her literary work to make a statement about her opinions and her desire for gender equality. In her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator and her husband rent a summer house and she spends most of her time in a room upstairs with barred windows and horrid wallpaper. The narrator is suffering from post-partum depression, which her husband calls temporary nervous depression, and is meant to be resting to cure it.…
The short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, is a first person gothic narrative that explores a woman’s mental experience on her own mental illness and how she is treated based on her demographics by the people around her. The story was placed in the late 19th century, in a time period when mental illness and mutual respect for women wasn’t entirely acknowledged as a whole. The narrator was brought into a new house with her husband, and senses an odd feeling in the home from the start. Her treatment for depression is based on her barely being active. She is placed into a room with no means of interest other than the non-definite patterned wallpaper in which she slowly begins to see patterns of other woman being trapped.…