After trying to convince her husband to allow her to visit her cousins she says, "It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight" (p 3). This may be a commonly used phrase (being able to think straight) , but how much more meaning and importance it has here. I can think of her mind as a series of twists and turns, in which the patterns are indiscernible. She may have straight thoughts now and then but soon enough it is complicated with another turn. It is obvious that she does not just have a nervous syndrome but how, if she is not able to figure out the pattern to her mind, will she become better.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Curving Mind
The yellow paper design is constantly turning and as Gilman tries to figure out one pattern she is thwarted with another swirl. It fustrates her greatly not to be able to see the pattern just as it would many people. I think her obsession with figuring out this pattern comes from the fact, that she can not figure out her own mind. Just as the yellow wall paper is an unending pattern that leads her to despair in trying to figure it out, she can not figure out the pattern of her own mind, nor can her husband for that matter.
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3 comments:
I think it is interesting that you refer to it as "the pattern to her mind." Are you suggesting that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with her but rather she thinks and interprets things different than most people? I think that would be a valid argument. I mean, how many people in history have been shunned by society or labeled "crazy" simple because they refuse to conform to certain behaviors/ ways of thinking. For example, Sylvia Plath was an accomplished writer who wrote about being a woman suffering depression in a time when depression was not understood. I suspect that in Plath's book and in Gilman's writings, the thing that really drove them "crazy" was the constant assumption of others who thought they knew what the women needed more than the women knew themselves. If others would just allow them to think and act freely according to their own interpretation of the world, maybe they would not have suffered so?
I agree that if Gilman were free to express herself she would not have suffered as much. I do think though that she may have been suffering from depression or post-pardum and that her "treatment" was making it worse. It must have been incredibly to difficult to live with not only that but her different way of thinking or her imagination. I like your use of Sylvia Plath and it certainly raises the question of how might there lives have been different, if people had not judged them so?
I really like the comparrison between the craziness of the wallpaper and the craziness in her mind. I think you have a really good point. Its strange to think about all the things we do in order to Not think about whats going on in our heads. I know ill play music and stuff to change my mood, so i don't think depressing thought and such! Its true that maybe she was paying such close attention to the wallpaper so that she wouldn't go crazy in that room. But in the end her mind gets the best of her.
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