Three Wacky Weeks

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Gilman Perkins, is an amazing insight into mental illness. This family moves into a colonial house for a few weeks and the narrator states a lot of information about the house in the beginning of the story "The most beautiful place! It is quite alone standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. It makes me think of English places that you read about". This quote makes the reader believe that she will experience the beauty of the gardens and be outside recovering from her illness, however, this woman never gets to leave the house she is forced to stay in bed starring at the wallpaper because her husband/doctor "John" has prescribed bed rest.  At first I felt so sad that she was on bed rest with an illness. Perkins describes her perspective of the wall paper as "The color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint....". The feeling of laying in bed day after day looking at this horrible scene in the wall paper was awful. As the story progresses and she goes back to the wall paper and forms a relationship with it, I started to realize something was terrible wrong. The narrator is clearly suffering a mental illness and her husband is not helping matters by depriving her of being outside and interacting with people and her baby. She changes her perspective about half way through and begins to appreciate the patterns of the wallpaper,  as if the writer was allowing us into the mind of a very sick lady. Mental Illness is misunderstood by many people in the world and I feel that this was a wonderful way to portray how it feels in the mind of someone suffering a mental breakdown. Her reality fluctuates between what is real and what is not. She thinks she sees a woman trapped behind the wall paper, and in many was she does see that woman, it is herself. She ends up locking her self into the room and begins a pattern of her own, crawling and standing on furniture to rip the paper away from the walls to allow the trapped woman out from her prison. This is a metaphor for the narrators need to get out of the room and the life style that has trapped her in her own mind. She has felt trapped and must get out in order to survive and become well again. When John comes home to find her he faints from the sight of her actions that her illness has caused and what has become of her. 

After reading a little more about this author, I found that she is recalling her own life and she wrote this story in the late 1800's to allow others to understand the mind of a mentally ill person so that we may better understand this tragic sad illness.

Three Different Strong Women

Women in a family can be very different we see this in the story "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker. Walker describes each woman uniquely at the beginning of the story, she starts with the mother/narrator by stating:  "In real life I am a large big boned woman with rough, man-working hands.... I can work outside all day, breaking ice to get water for washing; .... one winter I knocked a bull calf straight in the brain between the eyes with a sledge hammer and had the meat hung up to chill before nightfall" (p5). This shows the tough life this woman has experienced she has had to struggle and do the man and woman's job in her family.  On the other hand  Dee who is eldest daughter is described as a young beautiful woman who is given gifts that any woman of color would want "Dee is lighter than Maggie, with nicer hair and a fuller figure" (p10). At another point in the story she gives a description of Dee's feet "her feet were always neat-looking, as if God himself had shaped them" (p16).  The tone set by this woman is one of superiority and she runs this family for sure. The description suggests that everyone has given into her wants. The youngest daughter Maggie's character is different, she is shy and has experienced great challenges, "She has been like this, chin on chest, eyes on ground, feet in shuffle, ever since the fire that burned the other house to the ground" (p9). The reader has a clear picture of these three women and as the story unfolds we see how their characters evolve, After a fire that changes their lives forever they raise funds to send Dee to college and one day she visits her family, she has changed her name and is more greedy and spoiled around her mother and sister. "Mama can I have these old quilts ?" (p59) At this point in the story the narrator is aware of the selfishness of this daughter. "I promised those quilts to Maggie for when she marries John Thomas" (p65), Maggie's character will not fight for the quilts, or engage in conflict, Walker describes the response that the mother has when she says "When I looked at her (Dee) its like something hit me on top of my head and ran down to the soles of my feet" (p76). She took a much needed stand for Maggie at this point in the story. The reader becomes aware of a change and a strength that is passed onto Maggie that she will carry with her always. In the end of the story as her older sister was leaving Maggie smiled "a real smile, not scared" (p81). These women are forever changed by the events of the story. Maggie has a new confidence and a mother that appreciates her and Dee gets knocked down a few pegs. Walker does a brilliant job of the description of characters in this story.