The Yellow Wallpaper...REACTION

In the story, The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman the marriage of the narrator and her husband, John. Their relationship seems to be very different from today's marriages because John is almost overbearing of the narrator. He wants to control every aspect of her life and he wants to make sure she is taken care of and healthy. The fact that he placed her in a nursery while she was sick gives off the impression that he is treating her like a parent would treat a child. I believe that this tendency to baby her is due to the unfortunate truth that women weren't socially accepted as dominant figures during this time of place in the story. He believes that she is a child that needs to be taken care of and controlled. This reaction shows that women were not treated equally as men in this time period, which further explores the concept of feminism. The narrator is treated feebly and is not allowed to think for herself or do what she wants to do. In other words, she is being repressed.
The subject of repression brings me to conclude that the yellow wallpaper symbolizes just that: Repression. I think this because the narrator spoke of the woman creeping behind the hideous yellow pattern of the wallpaper and how she was rattling or shaking the "bars" back and forth. This means that the woman was being held back by the theory that women were incapable of surviving without men. I also think that the woman could represent the narrator because she is being repressed by her husband and the social trends of this time period.
The narrator even sympathizes with the woman behind the wallpaper when she believes to see the woman "creeping" in the daylight on page 15, "I don't blame her a bit. It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight!" Then, at the end of the story on page 18, she actually is caught creeping by her husband and she says to him, "'I've got out at last,' said I, 'in spite of you and Jennie. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!'" This shows that the narrator sees herself as the woman behind the yellow wallpaper. She is acting like the woman because she relates to the repression the woman is going through. The narrator is being held back mostly by her husband and the time period, while the creeping woman is contained by the yellow wallpaper.

Ethan Frome...LITERARY CRITICISM #4

Within "Edith Wharton's Dream of Incest: Ethan Frome" by Ferdâ Asya, the thesis of this analysis seemed to be that Wharton feared the punishment for the feelings she had for her father, however as I read further into the article, I found that the thesis may be that she used this novella as a need for punishment.
This thesis was shown through the novella of Ethan Frome because the work was used to show the "writer's urge to confess the guilt that she unconsciously felt for her incestuous desire for her father" as said by Ferdâ Asya. This "urge" is also the reason that Wharton feels the need for her characters to be punished for their immoral feelings. This article also brings about Wharton's personal experience with an affair she had that lasted two years. Her own feelings relate to those of Ethan's because she looks for an escape from her loveless and also unfaithful husband. She feels the need to punish herself by punishing Ethan because she knows what she did was immoral and wrong. However, she felt more incestuous when she began to have desires for her father. This led her to ultimately punish the characters by forcing them to live in unhappiness and regret for their feelings at the end of the novella. As well as penalizing the characters because of her own experiences, the author prevents Ethan and Mattie from engaging in an emotional or physical relationship because of the guilt feeling. The author uses their lack of a relationship to exude the need for punishment brought out by the guilt because she feels just thinking about the possibility of a relationship was immoral in this time. This shows that she wants to punish herself through her characters, which displays a need for punishment. This work was said to be a "dream-wish," which was described as the motive force for producing dreams supplied by the unconscious, by Sigmund Freud. These "dream-wishes" eventually became "dream-thoughts" from Wharton's frustrating and agitating incidents of her life trying to search for the reasons of her disillusioned wishes. Wharton had wishes and desires about her father. Ethan is seen as a father figure in this book to Mattie Silver, which are the two main characters who experience the dominant form of pain. These wishes proved to be Wharton's need for reprimand.
I believe that this argument was extremely well put and the thesis of the article was clear and supported by many points. Besides the ideas presented previously, there were many other suggestions that prove Asya's thesis is valid. I agree with the points brought about by Asya and I believe that Wharton's main purpose for this novella was created because she felt a need to punish herself for the immoral feelings she had for her father through the characters of the novella, Ethan Frome.
I noticed that in the article, Asya mentions that in 1907, Wharton was very lonely. I wonder if this loneliness led her to think about feeling intimate desires for her father, which ultimately led her to write the novella, Ethan Frome. The writer also moved to Paris that winter and lived alone, which is when these feelings for her father began. This loneliness could also be a reason for her need to punish the characters of Ethan Frome, while also punishing herself in the process.

Ethan Frome...SEASONAL IMAGERY!

"After the funeral, when he saw her preparing to go away, he was seized with an unreasoning dread of being left alone on the farm; and before he knew what he was doing he had asked her to stay there with him. He had often thought since that it would not have happened if his mother had died in spring instead of winter" (Wharton 62).

I chose this passage because I understood the deeper meaning of this seasonal imagery right away. I remember from the sonnet lessons what each of the four seasons represents. I was drawn to this passage primarily because of the thought process Ethan Frome goes through. He seems to relate his marriage to the season of winter and when his mother had died. The season of winter has been symbolic of things like cold, brittleness, and old age. The fact that Ethan describes his wife’s appearance as cold and wrinkly shows that her cold expression and her aging relates to the season of winter because those are the portrayals given by the symbolic meaning of winter. I think that this shows the function of imagery as well, because it gives the reader a deeper and more complex way of grasping an idea, such as the true meaning of the season, winter.
The description of the setting gives the reader a chance to further interpret an idea brought about by the author. The different meanings of each season illustrates the diverse possibilities of these interpretations, which proves that the setting description can be used to help a reader further explore the deeper meaning of the ideas brought about by life. The different situations that the characters go through in the book establish the effect that seasonal imagery has on the reader’s judgment. Ethan questions his relationship with his wife by discussing the different possibility in setting change when he asked her to stay with him. This signals the reader to consider Ethan as an ambivalent man who seems to make excuses to make up for his hesitant nature.