Category Archives: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Utopia or Dystopia?

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uto·pia

noun \yu̇-ˈtō-pē-ə\

: an imaginary place in which the government, laws, and social conditions are perfect

: a place of ideal perfection especially in laws, government, and social conditions

dys·to·pia

Noun \(ˌ)dis-ˈtō-pē-ə\

: an imaginary place where people are unhappy and usually afraid because they are not treated fairly

: an imaginary place where people lead dehumanized and often fearful lives

“All about up here were the lovely small things I needed; and not only
these, but the lovely big things that make one feel so strong and able
to do beautiful work.” “The Cottagette,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is definitely a utopian story. The narrator, Malda, describes her new home as a “fairy land of sun and shadow.” At first she is very content with her living conditions but soon her utopia starts to disintegrate when she tries to impress a man that has caught her attention. She begins taking her friend’s advice to pursue this man by cooking for him which takes up most of her time. Although she is good at it, she has no interest in it. In the end of the story, Ford encourages her to give up her cooking and to instead continue embroidering which makes her very happy. He asks her to marry him and I assume this was the final touch she needed for her new home.

“The Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is my favorite reading so far. The narrator is a distressed woman who is obviously unsatisfied with her surroundings and her domestic life. Her husband is not very supportive of her and tries to convince her otherwise every time she voices an opinion of her own about matters pertaining to their new home or anything that has to do with her inner feelings . In order to escape her reality she buries herself in her secret diary in which she writes about her fixation with the yellow wallpaper in the home which she describes as “menacing.” “There are things in that paper which nobody knows but me, or ever will. Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day.It is always the same shape, only very numerous. And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don’t like it a bit. I wonder—I begin to think—I wish John would take me away from here!” I believe she sees herself in the wallpaper and so she is basically figuring herself out through it. As the story goes on she seems more and more miserable with her life and soon drives herself into insanity with the help of her oblivious husband. In the end of the story, she tries to set the trapped woman in the wallpaper free by biting and scratching it off and her husband finds her in this state and I believe by then it is far too late for her. This story is definitely dystopian because the main character is completely dehumanized by the end.

 

The Yellow Wall-Paper: Horror Story

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  • According to one examination of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” and its publication history, the story did remain in print in between its reprint in 1920 and its feminist re-discovery in the 1970s–in horror story collections. In what ways do you see “The Yellow Wall-Paper” as a horror story? Include specific references to the text to support your claims.

I believe the most terrifying type of horror movie isn’t the one with monsters, aliens or a lot of blood; it’s the one with a character who loses his/her mind. That is perhaps because I do have the fear of losing control over my conscious one day. The main character in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” goes through some hallucinogenic situations– which later in the piece become more evident–  that I have no doubt could be featured in a horror story. Examples are “I think that woman gets out in the daytime! And I’ll tell you why–privately–I’ve seen her! I can see her out of every one of my windows!”; “I don’t like to look out of the windows even– there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast.”; ” I’ve got a rope up here that even Jennie did not find. If that woman does get out, and tries to get away, I can tie her!”. She narrates her experience dealing with women who come out of the wall-paper in her room.

Also, the setting is terrifying: windows with bars, decadent state of walls, bed nailed down to the floor. Interesting is how the main character doesn’t seem to mind it that much, and focuses on the wall-paper as a form of escapism.

Utopia and Dystopia

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Which story is utopian and which is dystopian ?

The words utopia and dystopia are two words that can greatly describe the two short stories by Charlotte Perkins titled ” The Yellow Wallpaper and “The Cottagette”. Utopia means an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect and dystopia means the complete opposite. Dystopia means an imaginary place where people are unhappy and usually afraid because they are treated unfairly. The story “The Cottegette” is in a utopian world while ” The Yellow Wallpaper” is in a dystopia world.

Although both stories are from the view point of two different women, but each have different situations.
The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” can be consider a dystopian world because the women is suffering from depression after the birth of her baby. Her husband orders her to stay in bad all day and do nothing as a cure for her condition. This form of treatment drives her to a state of misery. She descends into madness in which she is confined in a room with ugly yellow wallpaper.

She then turns her imagination onto the wallpaper to ignore her present state of mind. In effort to do so the narrator realize that the predicament of the women in the wallpaper is a symbolic version of her own situation.She identifies herself with the women trapped for so long in the wallpaper.The wallpaper can be a symbolic place where the narrator was trapped with no voice of her own, only the horrible patterns that she was so fixed to. This place was full with misery and unhappiness just like a dystopian world.

The short story “The Cottegette” can be considered a utopian world because the in the story it showed a women that truly loved a man and only wanted to have him to herself. They lived in a beautiful house away from everyone else. She cooked, cleaned and did everything possible to get through the man she wanted to marry. Just like the perfect utopian world, at the end of the story the guy proposed to her.

A Depressed Woman’s Marriage

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In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator and her husband, John, have a difficult relationship. She suffers from depression and her husband is a physician. However, he doesn’t consider that his wife is suffering from something that she can’t control. Instead, he treats her condition as if its self-inflicted, and she could stop making herself sick at any time. He brings her to a abandoned mansion for them to live in for a few months. In this time, the narrator writes about her thoughts and her feelings, as well as the events that are taking place around her and what she thinks she sees. Her writing allows us as readers to get an idea of her relationship with her husband. Some quotes give clues of their relationship. One quote is “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency- what is one to do?” This expresses how John sees his wife’s condition. He doesn’t take it as a serious problem, but as his wife being hysterical. Also, the narrator asking what can she do suggests that she feels stuck in her situation with no one to rescue her. Anyone who would take special concern for her is strayed away be her husband’s words. The couple don’t see eye to eye about what is really going on. Another quote is “He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction”. The narrator takes John’s guidance as loving gestures. Throughout the story, the narrator isn’t allowed to write( even though she does when John’s not around), think too much and must rest a lot. She also has to take medication to help her ‘get over’ her sickness. The last quote is “‘What is it, little girl?’ he said. ‘Don’t go walking about like that, you’ll get cold…Bless her little heart! said he with a bug hug, ‘she’ll be as sick as she pleases!…” I was in shock when her referred to his wife as a little. this statement made me question the relationship between the two, if they were really married couple or if it was just in the narrator’s head. It is not common and very questionable for a man to call his wife a little girl in a serious manner. The fact that he called her a little girl confirmed my thoughts of John being controlling over his wife because he sees her as someone that he isn’t equal to, as a married couple should be, but as a child that doesn’t know any better.

 

Conscientiously

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Conscientiously-(adjective)- Controlled by or done according to ones inner sense of what is right.

Page 9, line13 of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper” : “I cannot keep count of them, though I have tried conscientiously.

In this line, Gilman is trying to say that she consciously tried to keep count, but she cant keep count.

The Yellow Wallpaper and The Story of an Hour

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In “The Story of an hour” by Kate Chopin I think that there is a reliable narrator. I believe this because in this story, the narrator is not a character. The narrator is talking in the third person’s point of view. This is the kind of narrator that knows everything about every character and gives you many details as to who the characters are, what they are feeling, what they are going through, etc. The narrator began the story by telling us a bit about Mrs. Mallard. The narrator told us “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible her husbands death. ” In that one sentence, the narrator told us a lot about the story. The ending of the story was also given away a bit because of something that the narrator had said. The narrator said “It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence o0f the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallards name leading the list of “killed”.” I thought that it was weird that the narrator put killed in quotation marks. Overall I thought that the narrator was a reliable narrator because they told the audience all the details and everything they said led up to something else.

The story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is different from “The Story of an Hour” because I didn’t feel like the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” was a reliable narrator. I feel like she wasn’t a reliable narrator because I believe that she was mentally ill. Her husband John is a physician who told her several times that she was not ill, but she still believes that she is. In the story the narrator says, “You see he does not believe I am sick!” I also think that she is a little bit sarcastic. She says, “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency- what is one to do?” I found that a bit sarcastic because she is telling us that her husband says that she is not sick, but she has all of these things wrong with her anyway. Overall, I do not believe that she is a reliable narrator because she only agrees with her own point of view.

Which is utopian and which is dystopian?

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We might use the words utopia and dystopia to describe the two short stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman that we read. What do those words mean? Which story is utopian and which is dystopian? Why?

I can clearly see how we can described both of these stories as utopia and dystopia. Let start of by saying that utopia means an ideal place or state. Dystopia means is an imaginary society in which social trends have culminated in a greatly diminished quality of life or degradation of values. I will consider “The Cottagette” as the utopia and “The Yellow Wallpaper” as the dystopia.

In “The Cottagette” we see that Malda has moved into a community which everyone has the same goal. The protagonist always seems to be positive about life. They all wanted to grow seeking for a better future. This will be considered to be an ideal place for Malda because she is associating herself with other people that have the same goals as her. We could also see the ideal state in her relationship with her partner who supports her no matter what. Mala was in a place where everyone shared their love for music.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” I see it being dystopia. In this story we see a woman that is clearly not able to make decisions for herself due to a “condition” her and her family think she has. The protagonist in this story gives the reader a sense of feeling trapped in her own home without the support of her husband.  She is not able to do things that she enjoys such as writing because her husband doesn’t like it. I also believe that she feels so disconnected with the outside world which causes to start imagine things that she sees in that yellow wallpaper.

Utopia and Dystopia

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***We might use the words utopia and dystopia to describe the two short stories by   Charlotte Perkins Gilman that we read. What do those words mean? Which story is utopian and which is dystopian? Why?****

A simple definition of utopia is an imagery place where laws, government and society are perfect.Utopia can also be a emotion or a state of mind. What I mean by this is that some one can live in a constant state of happiness, never feel any sadness, that can also be characterized as a utopia. The opposite of this is called dystopia,this a place where there is society filled with misery and destruction. this can also be characterizes as depression. Dystoipa & Utopia doesn’t just have to be about the society itself , a big role in these two definitions is a persons state of mind , in my opinion.

In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper I believe that it is a dystopia narrative. The reason for this is because there wasn’t much joy or happiness express throughout the story. It seems that the tone of the story was very depressing and sad. the protagonist of the story didn’t express much love instead she expresses sadness and misery throughout the story.

In the story “The Cottagette”would be expressed as an utopia.the tone of the protagonist was very happy and joyful of life. In the story the setting was always described as beautiful and happy place.Overall the tone of this story was quite and beautiful unlike the tone of “The Yellow Wallpaper”.

Narrator Reliability

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Some of you have begun to consider the issue of narrator reliability. Compare narrator reliability in “The Cottagette” and “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” or compare one of these with the reliability of the narrator in “The Story of an Hour.” Include examples by quoting from the text to show what informs your sense of reliability.

In “The Story of an Hour”, according to the narrator, Mrs. Mallard did not know how to deal with her husband’s death at first. She seems confused. First she starts crying hysterically then when she is in her room alone, she starts thinking about beautiful the spring was which clearly indicated that she knew that was a new beginning for her. She was also thinking about how she would have her freedom now that her husband is gone. The narrator wrote “And yet she had loved him-sometimes-often she had not”. This also shows confusion for the reader. I asked myself two questions; Did Mrs. Mallard really love her husband? Why is that she was not clear as to how much of Mrs. Mallard loved her husband? Also in the story Mrs. Mallard often talk to herself. She lacks emotional skills to deal with her situation and this makes the reader question her reliability, just as in the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” where the narrator seemed confused about her emotions and often talked to herself.

Gilman’s inner thoughts revealed

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The narratives in each writing by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is specific to the type of text. For example, in “The Cottagette” as well as in “The Yellow Wallpaper” the first person narrative is used to explain to the reader the situation without giving the background, more as it actually happens in the text. Gilman uses this technique in order to unravel the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by depicting her mental breakdown as it happens. From the beginning the reader can assume she is trustworthy as a narrator, but only after continuing along can the reader see the unreliability of the narrator. However,  in “The Cottagette” we find that Malda is more reliable but fickle in her decisions; regardless she is trustworthy as a narrator. Unlike the short stories, in Women and Economics, Gilman uses the third person narrative in order to explain her theories on “social intercourse” and the relationships between families in the household. Gilman uses words such as She or he to set up situational context to engage the reader of her proposition.This is essential for this type of writing because Gilman must be able to relate and express her opinions on social relationships and gender roles. In Women and Economics, Gilman states boldly “take kitchens out of the home” to make for a “true personal expression”. I believe this relates to “The Cottagette” because Malda is told by her friend Lois that in order to get Ford Mathews to marry her, she must be a homemaker and a cook. Malda then begins to leave behind her love of art to cook more. Later on, Ford Mathews says that he does not need her to do this, and loved seeing her as she was before when she was expressing herself by drawing. Gilman pushes the message that they are equals and that Malda is able to express herself with him, without having to be a homemaker. Malda even states at the conclusion “Was there ever a man like this?”.