Writer's Attitude in The Yellow Wallpaper

In reading Charlotte Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, I was, obviously, most struck by the author's attitude throughout the story.  From the beginning, it seemed clear to me that the writer was deliberately trying to evoke pity/sympathy for herself from her readers, but because of her chronically bad attitude, she fell considerably short of successfully getting any from me.

First of all, I have to acknowledge the extreme irony in the woman's situation regarding her mental state.  In the beginning, though she complains all too much about the littlest things, she appears to be quite sane.  However, her husband and her brother are both "doctors," and both thoroughly convinced she is "sick."  She professes to us the audience herself, though, that she is fine, simply complaining all too much about the littlest things about the house and about how the simplest of things, like write freely of whatever is on her mind, or tolerate her husband, are extremely difficult and fatiguing endeavors for her.  I mean, it goes without saying that one should not spend so much time thinking (and complaining about) a wallpaper.  These huge problems in the writer's life that she alludes to, to me, appear to be a classic example of what I would call first-world problems.  The writer's attitude is dominated by a sense of "life is hopeless," "it's out to get me," as she constantly repeats the query "what is one to do?"  And this terrible attitude, coupled with her chronic complaints and constant glass half-empty mentality, is the reason that I feel no sympathy for her.

Eventually, we find out that the husband's motivation for keeping his wife in the house and encouraging her to "get better" is really to get her to look better physically.  We see this directly as the writer refers to her loss in weight and better figure, which she points out to her husband, and immediately pinches a nerve.  We also discover him to be a classically self-entitled doctor, who, being a doctor, assumes he is right about everything, as he claims his wife is getting better while we see her spiraling downwards into a clear state of insanity.  This insanity, I believe, is pretty self evident-she hallucinates women out of her windows, spends literally all of her waking hours looking at her wallpaper, and eventually convinces herself that she was birthed from it, and begins trying desperately to immerse herself back into it by clawing at it and running herself up and down the walls.  How much more evidence for insanity could even a doctor ask for?

In the end, I was almost expecting something significant (or, at least, more significant than just causing someone to faint) to come from the wallpaper.  I suppose I grew suspicious of this as the writer began to allude to her secret motivations to control people-tie them up, specifically, and we also see her becoming extremely skeptical and even afraid of her family members, John, her husband, included, as she convinces herself that they harbor similar thoughts and delusions to her own about the wallpaper.  Ultimately, though, her clear-cut insanity causes nothing more than to freak her husband out sufficiently enough to make him lose consciousness, and we are left to imagine what is to come of their meager relationship from there.

Response To an Article About Abraham Lincoln's Death (Harper's Weekly)

I feel obliged to first explain that I chose to read this particular article because I just last night saw the movie Lincoln in theaters, and was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would.  Granted, it wasn't a "thriller" per-se, since it pretty much entirely just consisted of dialogue rather than a bunch of Hollywood action sequences, but that dialogue was compelling nonetheless.  Also, being a huge Joseph Gordon-Levitt fan, I will add that Lincoln was far from being his best performance, so ultimately I wound up liking the movie for completely different reasons than I thought I would.  So there's that.  Having said all of that, the film ended abruptly with the death of Lincoln on which it did not elaborate whatsoever, so that made this article particularly meaningful to me.  I was immediately struck by the deliberate articulateness of the writer.  "[A nation's] chosen leader was stricken down by the foul hand of the cowardly assassin.  Exultations that had known no bounds was exchanged for boundless grief."  That, to me, resonates on a level that only the likes of Shakespeare can compete with.  And the entire article was permeated by such a writing style.  However, as flowing and beautiful as the writing was, the writer didn't really have much to say about Lincoln's death aside from the typical who done it, what Lincoln had been doing immediately before the shooting, and a convoluted sounding theory on how he suspected there was also an intended hit on General Grant.  Ultimately, the article simply served its purpose as just that, a to the point (though articulately), report style newspaper article, without much creative insight on the event itself or the impact it would have, aside from the "boundless grief" it professes Lincoln's sudden death had burdened the nation with.

Aside from the article itself, I was also intrigued by the Harper's Weekly banner at the top of the page.  It was incredibly detailed and, by my judgement, really well done, featuring some perfectly sketched hands (which are really hard to draw), as well as an inviting looking sunny sky, a lute, a painter's palette, a telescope, and a globe, which lent a philosophical kind of feel to the paper.  There were also some equally detailed drawings, one of which featured an extremely elaborate rendering of Lincoln's coffin, upon which sprawled a weeping young woman who I assumed to represent America, if only because the drawing also had a soldier from each side of the war weeping, head in hands, on either side of the coffin landscape.  Overall, there were a lot more compelling things said in the artistry of Harper's Weekly than in its writing that I experienced, though I was equally impressed by how well done that reportative style writing was done.

Roaring Camp

I found Harte’s writing style in Roaring Camp to be intensely interesting and mildly annoying.  Okay, maybe it was intensely annoying too…but as an observing narrator displaced from the real-time of the events he is relating, he seemed to be presuming quite a bit about the events he discusses and the people involved in them.  For example, right from the start when we are introduced to our first developed character, Cherokee Sal, the first thing we learn about her is that “she was a coarse and, it is to be feared, a very sinful woman.”  That sounds very suspiciously more like a personal opinion than a measurable reality to me.  It also interested me how Harte portrayed his characters…they all came across as very down low, primitive, uneducated people, which certainly might be expected of the pioneers living on the frontier of civilization, not to mention the pilgrims of America.  We see this in dialogue like “see what you kin do.  You’ve had experience in them things.”  So that all may be fine and good and go down in my mind as realistic and well-written dialogue given the context, but it directly contradicted with his own writing style so much so that it made the reading process a bit abrasive.  Let me elaborate on that…dropping fancy words like “climes,” “putative,” and “extempore” right after such unsophisticated, meat-and-potatoes dialogue and the introduction of characters named “Kentuck” and “Stumpy” can only have one possible motivation written all over it…the guy is trying to sound sophisticated.  And trying much too hard, in much too inappropriate of a context.  Aye, there’s the rub for me that I alluded to earlier…in Roaring Camp, Harte’s writing just seems so abrasively self-contradictive.  It just doesn’t do to take one of the most unsophisticated subjects imaginable and try to embellish as many bells and whistles of sophistication as humanly possible.  Maybe he’s just trying to be taken seriously…but as I scratch my head over this, I just can’t bring myself to take him as anything but another pretentious author who thought he really had something in nothing.  Granted, though, it certainly doesn’t help his case that there are literally millions more of those now than there were when Harte was taking pen to paper.  Yes, pen to paper…not finger to keyboard.

Surprised Dickinson Reading

In my reading of the Dickinson poems for today (which, come to think of it, might actually be my first intensive look at Dickinson in my scholarly English career) I was really surprised to see how dark and depressing Dickinson's poems for the most part were.  Upon reflecting on it, I realized that pretty much every single thing we've read thus far (accepting Benjamin Franklin, perhaps?) has been depressing...maybe its the shaky start America got off to, or maybe its just an over-saturation of puritan ideals, but comparatively speaking Dickinson definitely isn't the most condemning of the literature we've read thus far.  Still, after the unparalleled darkness and depression of Poe and the absolute insanity of Hawthorne, for whatever reason (maybe just my former ignorance of her work) I was expecting something a little more...uplifting from Dickinson.  From the very outset of most every poem, things seemed dark..."success is counted sweetest by those who never succeed," "a certain Slant of light...that oppresses," "I like a look of agony" just shot me down out of the sky of happiness in flames so fast I didn't even know what had happened.  "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" was the only one of the poems I had already read, but it was definitely good to revisit it...this is really where Dickinson turned on a coin for me and started to sound more like I was expecting her to.  My favorite poem of the bunch, though, was definitely This world is not conclusion-despite the ominous eerieness that pervades it.  When I first read the last two lines "Narcotics cannot still the Tooth that nibbles at the soul," it seemed to come across as the most powerful line of literature I could remember reading.  It definitely produces some thought-but behind that thought that varies by the reader, powerful lines like this seem to suggest an undeniable undertone of known truth.  And for Dickinson to end a poem with a dash...I personally thought that was kind of hilarious, just because she had been ending lines with dashes the whole poem it at first glance looks like she may have just stuck it in there for good measure, but it also creates a kind of open-endedness to go with the end of the poem that pairs very well with her closing line...almost like the dash is an invitation to ponder thoughtfully on what the poem really means to you as an individual, because there are certainly a lot of conversations it opens up depending on your interpretation.  I personally think it just echoes her first line-that this world is not conclusion, because "narcotics" (a man-made entity) "cannot still the Tooth that nibbles at the soul."  What I take from this is, as powerful as we may think ourselves to be, we aren't God and we don't have all the answers, and we can't change our world or ourselves as people through our own trifling mortal creations.  There is something bigger than all of this, this world is not conclusion, and nothing we say, do, or think will change that.  And I think that's a good reminder to have, to help us take ourselves off of our high horses and give ourselves up to life and God in appreciation of this experience for what is is now and what it will be, in its elusive conclusion.