The Awakening

                In the article by Katherine Kearns titled “The Nullification of Edna Pontellier”, the author’s purpose was to talk about how Edna’s suicide in the water symbolizes birth as well as death. The Author makes many great points one being that Edna’s ‘awakening’ helped her to stir up great powers, she starts to realize that she has many strengths and she wants to change her life. The author compares Edna to Sleeping Beauty because it is better for the public when she is sleeping, kind of like how it was better for the people around Edna before she has her awakening. A second great point that Kearns makes is “… that once one’s egoism is a defined condition, it may awaken a profound self-disgust and weariness.” This is important because it provides a valid reasoning for why Edna had even started to go on this search for herself, maybe she was disgusted by herself for taking things from her husband for so long. Also she makes the point that It is hard for a women to see a vision of herself while looking into a masculine mirror. All of these points lead up to one important one, that the future in Edna’s eyes is not a mystery that she never attempted to penetrate, but it was a foregone conclusion that she perceives to bring on her suicide.  The author proves is that Edna’s love for Robert will subside and that her kids will have to suffer from her if she did not suffer from her own death and that the sea mirrors the soul’s abyss which could be the reason that the author of this article believe Edna’s suicide symbolizes birth and death. I believe that the author did a great job at proving her point; the article truly helped me to see that her suicide can be portrayed as birth and death.  I agree with the author’s thesis because she did a great job at getting her point across. Overall I truly enjoyed reading the article.

'The Story of an Hour'

The short story “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin was a very interesting story. I was a bit confused while reading it because at the beginning of the story we as readers all thought that Mr. Mallard has died in an accident, his wife got sad because she thought she lost her husband. She was starting to think about how she was going to live without her husband; she did not know what she was going to do. After she thought about it for a little while she realized that now that her husband is gone she would be able to live her life the way that she wanted to. She no longer had to do things for her husband or because her husband wanted her to, she now could go about her life the way she wanted to and she could do things for herself. This surprised me because most women who lose the person that they love do not immediately think about how they can do whatever they want to, they morn over their loved on being lost for a little while at least. I did not expect her to just be kind of happy that her husband passed so she no longer had to do things the way she wanted to do not the things her husband wanted her to do. Another thing that surprised me while I was reading this story was that she felt so strongly about finding out that her husband was not in the accident after all that she had a heart attack and died. This is kind of ironic because they whole story we thought that Mr. Mallard was the one who died but in the end of the story Mrs. Mallard was the one who had died from her heart being so bad.  

Ethan Frome

1.)    The author’s purpose for writing this article was to show how the novel Ethan Frome relates to Edith Wharton’s personal life and relationships and how they influenced the writing of the novel.

2.)    The author of this essay makes many points on how this book relates to Edith Wharton’s personal experiences. Throughout the essay Cynthia Griffin Wolff, who is the author, says that Edith Wharton married a man who had acquired an illness and needed to be taken care of so Wharton was the one to help him try to get better. That is one similarity between Ethan and Edith; they both have to take care of an ill spouse. But the peculiar part is that while Edith was tending to her sick husband she had a lover who she had fooled around with, just like how Ethan and Mattie had a secret love for each other. Also, Edith’s husband had suspected the secret relationship and would no longer let her leave the house to go visit anyone really, and once Zeena started to suspect something she tried to end it to.

3.)    I believe that the argument presented in this article very well backed up. I think this because the author does not simply state these facts to prove her point, she used letters that Edith had actually written to her lover to show that it was actually true and did happen. I think that the author had gone into much depth in studying Wharton’s life n order to obtain such great information.

4.)    I most defiantly agree with the argument presented in this essay, I think that with the evidence that Wolff presents is very hard to disagree with. I do not think that anyone would be able to say that there are no similarities between Ethan Frome and Edith Wharton. It was a great article and I truly enjoyed reading it, it got me to think a little differently about the story.

"The Yellow Wallpaper"

In "The Yellow Wallpaper" the main character is telling the story; she has some sort of illness though we never know what it is. I personally think that she is not going insane, I believe that the narrator is just looking for a way out of something and just trying to find the old her. She repeatedly states in the story that many of the things that she does is because her husband wants her to. For example, she wanted their bedroom to be down stairs in the house but he refused and now it is upstairs just like he wanted it to be. The woman in the wallpaper is symbolic because she is trapped and cannot escape, just like how the narrator is trapped in her life just going along and doing what her husband wants her to. She said that during the day the woman in the wallpaper is free and can go about but it is not until night time that she gets trapped into the wallpaper. This is important because during the day the narrator is ‘free’ because her husband is at work, she can do the things that she enjoys and it is not until her husband gets home that she starts to feel trapped because things always have to go his way. When the narrator starts to rip of the wallpaper it makes he look insane but she just really wants to not be so controlled by her husband. It is not until she finished the job of taking the wallpaper off the wall that she starts to feel ‘free’ again. At the end of the story the narrator say “…you can’t put me back,” (Gilmore 18). This leads me to believe that the old narrator is back, the one who does things for herself not only because he husband has told her to, she does not feel trapped by him any longer and does not intend to every fall like that again.