Second Take

Reading "The Yellow Wallpaper" for the second time in my career here at Saint Mary's, I was struck by a few things. First off is the differences and similarities of the two classes that I've read it in. Humanistic Studies is, as Professor Williamson-Ambrose said on the first day of class, an interdisciplinary field. To me, that makes it about making connections from one topic to another, or in this case, from one class to another. I first read this text in my 109W English course first semester last year. Two of the novels we read in that class were Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, two texts referenced in our previous assignment by Virginia Woolf. Reading "The Yellow Wallpaper" made me further connect these two classes in my mind, and notice how Humanistic Studies does cross set up boundaries. In my English course last fall, we focused mostly on the texts themselves, with some background information on the author. In Hust., however, we look into what is going on in the time period these works have been written in- how these outer forces effect what is being written, why its being written, and so on. Two very different courses, but with certain elements present in each that make them even more effective. 

The second thing that I noticed in reading "The Yellow Wallpaper" again was the details that I forgot about from my previous reading. I remembered certain details such as the narrator's husband John treating her as a child, the narrator hating the wallpaper then, in the end, having an extreme connection to it, but my mind let slip the parts about the rings in the walls, bars on the windows, the nailed down bed, the line around the room, and the areas of paper ripped off or torn at. Funny how my mind would retain the lesser "evil," "normal" details compared to these. Maybe it was an unconscious protective mechanism since normally I don't try to remember details of those sort, or I just didn't find them all that important. Reading them again made me feel disturbed almost, and brought back memories of feeling the same way when I first read it. The narrator's reaction to these details was also one that made me uneasy. How could she assume that these would be elements of a nursery or boys' school? And why doesn't she connect that the house must have been empty for a number of years, had legal trouble, and be so far away from the town for a reason? She might be depressed, but wouldn't these details stand out as being abnormal? 

In reading this, the flaws in the "Rest" cure stand out to me right away, and its no wonder that the women following it went crazier rather than improving. If you shut me up in a room with crazy wallpaper, by myself, all day, every day, and in the summer, I think I'd get a little loony too.