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!