"The Yellow Wallpaper" Reaction

    The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is an ironically innocent title for a short story with such a dark plot. This narrative chronicles the mental deterioration of a woman, Jane, living in Victorian England. In line with the repressive undertone of the era, Jane's husband, John, restricts Jane in numerous ways to try to remedy her illness. But little does he know that his pressure only drives Jane further into madness. The climax of her collapsing mental state occurs when she is unified with the shadow of a woman she sees in the wallpaper covering her room. This ominous phenomenon has been the object of much debate among literary critics and scholars.
    This event, I believe, is the ultimate result of Jane's loneliness. To recover from her mental sickness she was prescribed extended stay in this bedroom, devoid of human interaction and physical activity. Early on in the story, Jane comments, "I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! But John would not hear of it" (Gilman 2). In her forced isolation, Jane spends days on end tracing the patterns in the ugly wallpaper, trying to reach some sort of conclusion in her otherwise fruitless life. The shadow of the woman largely symbolizes the failure of this medical treatment. What was meant to cure Jane of her mental pain only drove her deeper into instability. Jane copes with the lack of the human experience by mentally inhabiting the personality of the silhouette in the wall. While I don't agree with the notion that Jane literally assumed the form of this shadow, it's certainly true that Jane thought so. Readers must remember that the narrative is told from Jane's point of view. Whatever we read in the text is shaped by her mental state; we interact with the plot through Jane's eyes. When Jane claims she became the shadow in the wall, the real Jane is still lying in bed trying her best to make sense of her situation with insufficient mental capabilities.

Works Cited

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. N.p., n.d. United States Library of Medicine. Web. 11 Mar. 2015.

Gothic for You, Not for Me

     Instinctively, humans tend to associate danger with the unknown. At first, most outsiders would be cautious of the jungles, traditions, and people of Africa. But for those who were raised in this environment, such cultural elements only form the backdrop of everyday life. Many students and scholars appreciate Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a work that adheres to gothic conventions. In doing so, however, we lose sight of the adventure - one man's foray into the unknown. We follow Marlow every step into the Congo and we classify his experiences as horrific and eerie, rather than accept the cultural differences that separate us from the Africans. In the end, the elements that we perceive to be gothic are simply byproducts of our Western interpretation of this novel.

     No scene better illustrates culture shock than when Marlow observes a fence near Kurtz's residence. At first, he thinks the fence is simply decorated with ornaments. When he realizes what he is actually seeing, Marlow thinks, "They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the first I had made out, was facing my way" (Conrad 112). As readers, we are simply repulsed by this sort of image, so we are comfortable calling it a gothic feature. Along with Marlow, readers are scared because decapitated heads are considered grotesque in our culture. However, preserving the heads of the dead is a symbolic practice of the local Congolese. This, of course, calls into question the objective nature of gothicism. In Western tradition, decapitation qualifies as gothic, yet in tribal Congolese tradition, this practice is commonplace. Thus, as cultural rules would dictate, gothicism rests in the eye of the beholder.

Works Cited

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness.NY,NY: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1988.