"The Story of an hour"

this was not my first time reading "The Story of an Hour". i read it my junior year of high school and had forgotten about what an interesting story it is until i read it the other day. for such a short story a very dramatic event takes place and that is why i beleive it is so well liked. after i read it i found myself just sitting there in shock thinking to myself, "did that all just happen"?

in the beginging of the story some foreshadowing takes place. the author mentions right away that Mrs. Mallard has a heart condition so from that moment on i anticipated something happening that affects the heart condition. i beleive in the next paragraph i found that something that i was looking for. when the news is broken to Mrs. Mallard about the death of her husband i was almost sure that she was going to have a heart attack right there. but then she doesnt. she walks upstairs and starts saying to herself, "free, free free". that part was the complete opposite from what i expected. Mrs. Mallard had lived her life for her husband so long that she no longer had an identity and it was making her miserable. that part of the story touched on the fact that masculinity is overpowering somethimes and feminity does not receive enough attention and freedom. after sitting in her room Mrs. Mallard leaves her room and is walking down stairs and Mr. Mallard walks in the front door shocking Mrs. Mallard. it is here where her heart condition comes into play and it immediatley kills her. So much happens in the hour in which this story takes place!

Thought on "The Story of an Hour"

I had read this story before, I think it was about 2 years ago.  When I started reading I recognized parts but did not necessarily remember the end, which came as a satisfying shock.  I felt it came thoroughly full-circle in a darkly comedic way.  Perhaps this is not how it was supposed to be taken, but I thought it was hilarious.  Granted, the oppression of women is sad, something which should not be done, but I feel that it may be taken for granted in modern times that women should not be oppressed.  Because of that I was not affected too terribly about that bit of subject matter and instead was stricken by the irony.  It is stated first of all that great pains were taken to break the news to her carefully because of her condition.  After the news was broken we get her reaction, immediate weeping and grief, but then we are presented with the image of a spring day.  Spring being the time of re-birth and renewal, we know immediately that things are to be more complicated than a simply sad widow.  I thought it was great how she then was frightened by her own thoughts.  She, perhaps because of the oppression (meaning her husband forcing her to realize that he is an important part of her life), or perhaps because he simply was her husband, fought off the feeling of being relieved of some heavy burden.  But she does succumb to them and becomes happier for a time than she can ever remember having been.  This seems like it could have been a satisfying end, but with the return of her husband and her death and then the "reason" for her death the audience gets a true shock, and my way of dealing with that shock was laughter.  I have no laughed out loud at a story in some time but the ending to this story made me positively break down.  I hope I don't seem callous.

The Descent into Insanity

The Yellow Wallpaper was an interesting journey. I think the popularity of this story lies in the credible way the author organizes the protagonist's gradual slide into insanity. Like Bartelby, I started the story completely open to the idea the main character might or might not be crazy. The more I saw of Bartleby, the more I realized his actions were logically connected to some type of principle or philosophy. The more I learned about the protagonist in the Yellow Wallpaper, the more I realized her action shared no rational relationship to reality. No scence personifies her madness better than the scence when the protagonist sees the maid looking at the wallpaper. She freaks out, becoming paronoid that her secret has been figured out. In reality, the maid is curious about where the yellow smudges on the protagonist's clothes originate. In this scence we learn that the protogonist is rubbing herself up and down the wallpaper. We realize she is insane.

But even before this scence, we see it. And the way Charlotte Gillman takes us with her on the journey is insanity is the engenious part of the story. We hear her innermost thought. As the story progesses, the thoughts get more frantic. And choppy. And senseless. And in a way it's entertaining. Perhaps, this is why this story get so much attention in English classes.

Bartleby, the Scrivener; A tale of hopelessness and wonder

Melville when writing Bartleby the scrivener uses imagery to evoke a sense of hopelessness and bleakness, he does this by painting a very basic repetitive image in the reader’s head. This is created straight at the beginning as he states; ‘Bartleby was one of those beings whom nothing was ascertainable’ this creates a sense of hopelessness because Bartleby is shown to be a person whom cannot obtain any knowledge. This can also be seen as bleak because if hypothetically he cannot learn then how is he able to advance in life, hence his future looks bleak. Hopelessness is again emphasized with the descriptions of the lawyers workers, ‘Turkey…but after 12 o’clock meridian-his dinner hour-it blazed like a grate full of Christmas coals; and continued blazing’ and then discussing the other scrivener ‘…and all time before twelve o’clock, meridian, was the quickest, steadiest creature, too, accomplishing a great deal of work.’ These quotations from the story evoke a sense of hopelessness because it seems that the lawyer is unable to attain a worker that is able to work well for the full day as he as one worker that only works well before 12 and another which only works well after 12.

       Continuing this sense of hopelessness and bleakness, Melville explains how Bartleby did an extraordinary job ‘at first’. The use of ‘at first’ creates a sense of bleakness because the reader now knows that something will go wrong eventually and the future seems to be indeed bleak. Hopelessness is then emphasized by the lawyers description of the scriveners job, ‘It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair’. The use of the words ‘dull’ and ‘lethargic’ could potentially make the reader ask the question why? Why work in a place so boring and tedious? This evokes a sense of hopelessness as they seem stuck in this dead end job and they seem unable to escape it. Melville furthermore shows hopelessness as he begins to show the change in Bartleby’s character, ‘Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, “I would prefer not to.”’ In refusing to accept the task a sense of bleakness is created as this represents the beginning of Bartleby’s decline and hopelessness, as we know that he will not recover from this slump. Hopelessness is finally further emphasized in this scene as the lawyer repeats his question however Bartleby again says, ‘I would prefer not too’ hopelessness is emphasized in this situation as the lawyer persisted in asking Bartleby to do this job however he keeps refusing. This shows that the lawyer is fighting a losing battle and hence his constant questioning is hopeless.

The Objectivist View

Do I live for myself, or for another? One is forced to ask this question to determine freedom, not in terms of the law, but philosophically speaking. The three short stories The Son’s Veto, The Story of an Hour, and The Yellow Wallpaper, by Thomas Hardy, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman deal explicitly with the question of whether we are truly free when we live in the shadow of someone else. “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged, the novel from which the aforementioned passage comes, would argue that no, we do not truly live, let alone live freely, when we submit to another. This does not deny love; rather, it expounds upon the virtues of equality within a relationship. However, the relationships within the three short stories are cases of anything but an equal relationship.

I argue that the characters of each of the three stories are weak characters in which an inferiority complex is easily identifiable. As such, none of the protagonists are free. Freedom, in regards to relationships between men and women, stems not from one party allowing another to do something, but from each of the parties having a mutual respect for the other. A gradual progression of dominance is seen from Veto to Wallpaper to Hour in which the protagonist is deprived of happiness, then of sanity, and finally of life itself. Had the relationship within each story moved from under the domineering shadow of oppression created by the obvious lack of mutual respect, the protagonists perhaps would have had a greater amount of respect for themselves, rather than becoming shells of human beings, never to live a truly fulfilled life.

9/14/08 The Dead

After reading James Joyce’s short story the dead I found it to be somewhat wordy. I didn’t find much meaning in the party that goes on in the story. It was somewhat frustrating to see the story end the way that it did, in that it was sort of a “and this is the end” type ending. However, I did find it interesting that Gabriel last thoughts seam to contradict his statement that her makes at the party. I find it interesting that it was also Gabriel’s wife Gretta who proves his theory that we should only think of things in the present and keep the dead and the things of the past in the past. Even more compelling is the fact that Gretta becomes nostalgic about Michel fury, the boy that she was in love with as a young girl. We could reasonably assume that this is the first time that Gabriel has heard about this boy from his wife. This sets up and interesting dynamic where Gabriel’s wife proves him wrong with the memory of her deceased childhood love. Moreover Gretta continues on to tell him that she thinks it was out of his longing to be with her that he died. This exchange sets up an interesting parallel between the winter night of the past, that Michel fury died on and the winter night in the present. This parallel proves Gabriel point that the past and the present are not link wrong once again. The story dives home the point that Gabriel was wrong with its ending imagery with they snow falling and Gabriel contemplating his own mortality.
On a separate thought I think that the Gabriel comes off as a jerk, first his insults lady at the door about her marriage prospects then here make a clearly wrong claim in his toast and latter her try to sleep with Gretta even thought she is clearly upset about her memory of Michel fury.

Latent Sexism

One of the most striking aspects of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” was the criticism of masculinity that can be found in the subtext of the story. At first glance, many of the slights toward the main character can be missed. We read about several instances where John denies the narrator when she requests a change in her desolate daily routine or her less than perfect accommodations in the room with the yellow wallpaper. The narrator has given up her own will, bending to John’s every request. Although John is a loving man, he is often very condescending toward the narrator. His language is often very similar to the way one might speak to a child when he is addressing his wife. When the narrator confesses that she has seen people walking down the lane through the window in her room, she records that John told her that, “my imaginative power and habit of story—making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try. (62)” It is certain that John’s words are not violent and they were probably not meant to be hurtful in any way; although they are terribly condescending in a way. Gilman was criticizing the society’s view of women as weak, emotional, and child-like creatures. The narrator has no choice but bend to the will of the men around her on even the most frivolous of issues. Gilman’s point was not to make John out to be a horrible, abusive husband, but instead to show how a woman could be driven to lunacy by a complete lack of respect from her society as well as her husband. I feel that Gilman’s true purpose in writing this story was to uncover the latent sexism that is so often carried by condescension and hidden by endearing words.