Feb. 28th Wednesday

I hope you all learned from the movie last day.

Next class will be our final class before the Exam on Friday.

We will work on some practice questions in class today.

Interpretation

As with many works of fiction, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" can be and has been subject to several interpretations and interpretive methods.

The story has been interpreted by feminist critics as a condemnation of the

androcentric hegemony of 19th century medical profession. The narrator's suggestions about her recuperation (that she should work instead of rest, that she should engage with society instead of remaining isolated, that she should attempt to be a mother instead of being separated entirely from her child, etc.) are dismissed out of hand using language that stereotypes her as an irrational being and, therefore, not qualified to offer ideas about her own condition.

Gilman indicated that the idea for the story originated in her own experience as a patient. Other feminist readings have pointed out the inequality of the marriage described in the story and have discussed this aspect of the story in relation to Victorian ideals and traditions of marriage.

"The Yellow Wall-Paper" is sometimes referred to as an example of

Gothic literature for its treatment of madness and powerlessness. It has also been published in collections of horror fiction, which has led some to speculate that the women in the wallpaper were actually ghosts bent on driving the narrator insane, and not hallucinations. The strong feminist statements in the work itself, as well as those of the author, do not lend support to this interpretation. In terms of feminism, it should also be noted that this short story was written during the Victorian era, a particularly stifling time for women and thus the woman's behavior can be seen as a reaction against social forces.

Another interpretation is to doubt the veracity of many of the narrator's early statements. There may never have been a husband, sister, baby, or any other characters as described in the story, meaning the entire story (or a large part of it) is the product of a deluded mind, so the reader cannot know what is true and what is not. Finally, she makes herself the woman inside the prison of yellow wallpaper, completely overtaken by her irrational reality.

Feb. 26th Monday

Today we have two classes. I will show you The Yellow Wall Paper movie. It will take both classes to watch.

HOME WORK FROM LAST DAY:

The Yellow Wall paper Questions

'The Yellow Wallpaper" tells the story of a woman's mental breakdown.

Suffering from depression following the birth of her first child, the woman is taken to the country by her physician husband, where she is kept in a room decorated with yellow wallpaper that used to be a nursery. Instructed by her husband not to engage in any intellectual activity and to get total bed rest, the narrator becomes obsessed with the wallpaper until, at the end of the story, she goes insane.



1892: Women cannot vote for public officials or hold public office.
Occupations other than teaching, nursing, low-level factory labor, or domestic service are closed to them, and a college education is rare.

Today: Women have achieved a great deal toward true equality with men. Virtually all occupations are now open to women. Many issues remain, however, including equal pay.
1895: A rash of so-called "hysteria" cases occur during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Friday February 23

I hope you all have recovered from running the ROAD RACE!

I think that all of you must feel brain drained after doing the puzzle activities!

The woman in the YELLOW WALL PAPER was also very tired from looking at the paper, as you all must be from looking at the work sheet!

Today we shall work on some in depth questions about the story.

Symbols

The Wallpaper

“The Yellow Wallpaper” is driven by the narrator’s sense that the wallpaper is a text she must interpret, that it symbolizes something that affects her directly. Accordingly, the wallpaper develops its symbolism throughout the story. At first it seems merely unpleasant: it is ripped, soiled, and an “unclean yellow.” The worst part is the ostensibly formless pattern, which fascinates the narrator as she attempts to figure out how it is organized. After staring at the paper for hours, she sees a ghostly sub-pattern behind the main pattern, visible only in certain light. Eventually, the sub-pattern comes into focus as a desperate woman, constantly crawling and stooping, looking for an escape from behind the main pattern, which has come to resemble the bars of a cage. The narrator sees this cage as festooned with the heads of many women, all of whom were strangled as they tried to escape. Clearly, the wallpaper represents the structure of family, medicine, and tradition in which the narrator finds herself trapped. Wallpaper is domestic and humble, and Gilman skillfully uses this nightmarish, hideous paper as a symbol of the domestic life that traps so many women.

Monday February 19th

Your Yellow Wall Paper Questions are due today.

On Friday we listened to the Radio Play of THE YELLOW WALL PAPER. I hope you all have a better understanding of the story from that.

Today we will work on some Vocabulary review and in class Questions.

Synopsis

When the story begins, with the woman and her husband, John, are traveling to an isolated country estate for a summer vacation. The woman suffers from an undefined illness, a kind of nervous fatigue, and the trip is an effort to cure her of it. The brief conversation between her and her husband quickly establishes important differences in their personalities: The woman is impulsive, given to flights of fancy and the imagination; John is stolid and eminently practical. When they arrive at the house, they are greeted by the woman's sister-in-law, Jennie, and the woman's infant child. The woman wants to hold and feed the baby, but John will not permit her to do so, seeking to distract her by extolling the wonderful views of the landscape.

A brief flashback gives more insight into one important source of the tensions between the woman and John: Dr. Mitchell, a prominent physician, has impressed upon John the importance of his theory of the gospel of rest, a form of therapy that calls upon women to abandon all forms of excitement created by artistic production. John reluctantly accedes to his medical advice. The woman is to be subjected to the enforced idleness of mind and body. Back at the country house, John chooses a room for the woman that was formerly a nursery, a room with barred windows and yellow wallpaper, far removed from the downstairs room where her baby sleeps.

As the story unfolds, the woman's voice becomes more and more central to the action. As she tells her story, the woman gives vent to her frustration about her treatment by her doctor and her husband, however well-meaning it may be intended. She also expresses her desire to work, to write, even as she confesses how tiring it is to engage in subterfuge to pursue her ambitions. Imprisoned in her room, she increasingly focuses her attention on the room's physical details, particularly the color and patterns of the wallpaper.

Against the backdrop of John's self-confident assertions about the causes of nervousness in modern civilization (one of which is the mental activities of women), the woman begins to lobby for different wallpaper in the confines of her room or to be moved to a room downstairs. John dismisses her preoccupations as obsessions and fancies. The woman begins to identify with the children who formerly occupied the nursery. She also begins to discern a strange figure who seems to skulk behind the mysterious patterns of the fading wallpaper. As the woman becomes more despairing about her condition, as she is treated more and more like a child by her husband, she becomes convinced that there is a woman stooping down and creeping behind the intricate pattern of the yellow wallpaper.


She comes to believe that the woman is shaking the pattern, trying to escape. Indeed, she believes that there are many women trapped behind the wallpaper. The woman ultimately concludes that the woman trapped behind the yellow wallpaper gets out in the daytime. She sees her creeping along the lane, on the road under the trees, hiding when the carriage comes. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight, she decides.


On her last day in the house, the woman sleeps in her room alone. John is spending the night in town. In the moonlight the woman sees the woman appear behind the wallpaper and runs to assist her, in the process peeling away yards and yards of wallpaper. The next morning, Jennie discovers what the woman has done and tries to persuade her to leave the room.

The woman refuses and locks herself in the room, continuing to peel away the wallpaper. Then she begins to creep around the room. When John returns home, he gains entry into the room and discovers her crawling on the floor. John faints. The woman continues to creep, crawling over him as she circles the room.

NO CLASS ON WEDNESDAY!

Friday Feb.16th

In early America, most states allowed women almost no legal rights of their own. They had to depend on a father, brother, or husband to represent them before the law. A married woman was almost the same as property. Anything that she brought to the marriage or earned afterwards became the property of her husband. A married woman could not enter into a contract independent of her husband. No woman could vote, serve on a jury, or hold public office.

Last class we worked on vocabulary and we did some questions on Symbols.

The work sheet is due today.

Today we wilisten to a radio play of THE YELLOW WALLPAPER.

Questions will follow the radio play, so please listen carefully.

Understanding The Radio Play
Before we look at the plays themselves, we need to ask: what is a radio play and how do we approach it as a form? A radio play is a unique artistic medium, one perhaps unfamiliar to teachers and students. The plays in this series, because they have been adapted from stories, have even more specialized attributes than most.

Three General Principles
The radio play is, first of all, a drama. Drama works through action, rather than narration, and the spoken, rather than the written, word. The audience does not read but watches and listens. They see actual people and hear their voices, with all the nuances of emotion that blocks of print cannot carry. Characters in plays must speak or gesture for us to know their thoughts. We cannot "read" their minds as we do in written stories. Thus students need to be attentive to such dramatic mechanisms as dialogue, monologue, the aside, even the chorus, to see how characters' thoughts are being conveyed-in conversation, in reading aloud, in muttering to themselves in private. Usually, of course, a play also functions through the unique features of the stage-props, curtain, the "three-sided box" with its fourth, "open" wall.
In radio plays, however, we cannot see dramatic movements that convey emotions and ideas. So here the representation of gesture through sounds must compensate. The pounding of a fist, the rocking of a chair, singing, hard breathing-all give us our sense of a character's response to a situation. Knowing what to listen for is the key to the dramatic impact. Because the radio play depends entirely on sound, the "props" of drama as a form are adapted. Noises replace visual aids that would be placed on a stage, and so the radio dramatist must be ingenious with how props sound-bells, doors, machines, furniture, musical instruments, clothing, traffic-all of these build the dramatist's repertoire of communication. As we will point out below, the development of active listening skills is essential for radio play audiences. In particular students will need, in these plays, to pay attention to tone of voice, to pitch, and to loudness and softness. They will need to work on developing a vocabulary for the emotions, the physical and mental states, that speech can convey: anger, fear, tenderness, surprise, resolve, joy, weariness, relief, among others.

These radio plays are literature. Thus as students listen, their knowledge of literary techniques serve them well. Matters such as character development, setting, the shifts in plot from introduction to climax and resolution, the use of metaphors and objects that carry symbolic meaning, often through the weight of repetition-all of these are the means through which the radio play makes its points. One of the best ways to use this series is to encourage students to think how the written medium must be transformed for drama in general and for the radio play in particular.

Wednesday February 14

HAPPY VALENTINES!

I hope you all had a great week!

We will continue working on the YELLOW Wall Paper activity sheet today.

I will introduce some new vocabulary too.

Wednesday February 7

Last class we listened to the YELLOW WALLPAPER.

We also talked about the following:

- 3 things that you were afraid of as a child.

- Describe your childhood bedroom in detail.

Today we will do some questions based on the short story.

REMEMBER NO CLASS ON FRIDAY!

Monday February 5th

Last Friday was your SCARLET IBIS final exam.



I will try to give you your results at the end of the week.



As fortoday we will be reading an American Gothic short story titled "THE YELLOW WALLPAPER" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman



ABOUT THE BOOK:

The story details in first-person (in the form of a series of journal entries) the descent into madness of a woman suffering from what her physician husband describes as a "temporary nervous depression — a slight hysterical tendency." The story hints that part of the woman's problem is that she recently gave birth to a child, insinuating she may be suffering from what would, in modern times, be called postpartum depression.

The narrator is confined in an upstairs room to recuperate by her well-meaning but dictatorial and oblivious husband, but this treatment only exacerbates her depression.

The room is decorated with yellow wallpaper that becomes the focal point of her insanity. She devotes many journal entries to obsessively describing the wallpaper — its "yellow" smell, its "breakneck", scrawling pattern, and the fact that it leaves yellow smears on the skin and clothing of anyone who touches it. She also obsesses over the hatred she believes radiates from the room, supposing that it must have once been a nursery, and that the children who lived in it hated the wallpaper as much as she. She describes how the longer they stay in the bedroom, the more the wallpaper appears to mutate and change, especially in the moonlight.