Monday, March 05, 2007
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Katja
ENGL 48 B
Journal # 27, Gilman
5 March, 2007
"I see her in that long shaded lane, creeping up and down. I see her in those dark grape arbors, creeping all around the garden." (Charlotte Perkins Gilman 841)
"She was standing at the bottom of the garden, watching the river ebb past, when she raised her eyes and saw this person or being, sitting on the white stone bench." (Doris Lessing, To Room Nineteen, 2553)
The first quote is from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-paper, a story which reminded me greatly of Doris Lessing’s To Room Nineteen, which supplied the second quote.
Both stories feature women on the brink of insanity stuck in rooms at the tops of their vast and romantically dilapidated houses. Gilman’s story is from 1892 and Lessing’s dates to 1963. Interestingly, both of these years represent eras in which women’s rights were hotly contested and current issues.
I love Doris Lessing and had read much of her work prior to taking ENGL 46C with Ms. Williams, who assigned Room, yet I had never heard of Gilman before this class. It is truly amazing how similar these stories are. The themes and settings are the same as is the spiraling of women’s minds into states of disconnection and alienation. Additionally, both protagonists are mired in marriages lacking in mutual love and respect. Both fictional husbands capaciously fulfill every feminist’s nightmare vision of the husband: the condescending, moronic, sadistic, simplistic shape hogging the blankets at the other end of the marital bed, all the while dreaming of a girl less evolved than himself.
What struck me first was the similarity of something viewed in the gardens of the houses. Male or female, these images or hallucinations simultaneously represent something seductive and abhorrent to the two women, perhaps their unconscious ids. (The gender tension in these two stories make it hard to avoid Freudian context). Their repressed states can only serve to fuel their destructive imaginations as opposed to allowing them to tap into their constructive inner lives. I get the sense that they are afraid of actually living their own lives, as they do not know how. Their lives belong to others.
Works cited:
Lessing, Doris. "To Room Nineteen." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed. Ed. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 2553.
ENGL 48 B
Journal # 27, Gilman
5 March, 2007
"I see her in that long shaded lane, creeping up and down. I see her in those dark grape arbors, creeping all around the garden." (Charlotte Perkins Gilman 841)
"She was standing at the bottom of the garden, watching the river ebb past, when she raised her eyes and saw this person or being, sitting on the white stone bench." (Doris Lessing, To Room Nineteen, 2553)
The first quote is from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wall-paper, a story which reminded me greatly of Doris Lessing’s To Room Nineteen, which supplied the second quote.
Both stories feature women on the brink of insanity stuck in rooms at the tops of their vast and romantically dilapidated houses. Gilman’s story is from 1892 and Lessing’s dates to 1963. Interestingly, both of these years represent eras in which women’s rights were hotly contested and current issues.
I love Doris Lessing and had read much of her work prior to taking ENGL 46C with Ms. Williams, who assigned Room, yet I had never heard of Gilman before this class. It is truly amazing how similar these stories are. The themes and settings are the same as is the spiraling of women’s minds into states of disconnection and alienation. Additionally, both protagonists are mired in marriages lacking in mutual love and respect. Both fictional husbands capaciously fulfill every feminist’s nightmare vision of the husband: the condescending, moronic, sadistic, simplistic shape hogging the blankets at the other end of the marital bed, all the while dreaming of a girl less evolved than himself.
What struck me first was the similarity of something viewed in the gardens of the houses. Male or female, these images or hallucinations simultaneously represent something seductive and abhorrent to the two women, perhaps their unconscious ids. (The gender tension in these two stories make it hard to avoid Freudian context). Their repressed states can only serve to fuel their destructive imaginations as opposed to allowing them to tap into their constructive inner lives. I get the sense that they are afraid of actually living their own lives, as they do not know how. Their lives belong to others.
Works cited:
Lessing, Doris. "To Room Nineteen." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed. Ed. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. 2553.
# posted by Katja @ 7:05 PM 
