The yellow wallpaper critical essay
the yellow wallpaper critical essay
In the mid-1880s, Alice James' commonplace book contains a revealing quotation from Eliot's letters: "There is something more piteous almost than soapless poverty in this application of feminine incapacity to literature." Strouse speculates that for James, "the anomalous literary realm occupied by the diary lay safely within the feminine province of the personal" (similarly, the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is driven to secret writing by her physician husband). By keeping a private diary, James avoided the risk of competition either with her brothers or with an androgynously named woman writer like George Eliot.But her journal reveals that she wrote with one eye on an imaginary audience, even if that audience represented her own divided consciousness.
thesis about the yellow wallpaper
The story is not only a "jeu de mélancolie"— Blackwood thought that Eliot "must have been worrying and disturbing herself about something when she wrote"— but a tale of uncanny dispossession.Like the haunted house in "The Yellow Wallpaper," the haunted consciousness of the narrator can be read as a symptom of social disinheritance; in this case, the disinherited mind or cultural exclusion that is one symptom of women's oppression. Eliot did not acknowledge the story as hers until near the end of her life, in the Cabinet edition of 1877, and its anonymity dissociates it still further from the culturally integrated George Eliot of the successful "realist" novels, whether pastoral or European.
research paper on the yellow wallpaper
"A letter always arrives at its destination": Lacan argues that the letter is always received, always reversed; Derrida argues that Lacan's epistolary law can miss its destination, go astray; Johnson, that its received meaning is always missing, always performed by the reader. Each reading is at once an intervention and an effect of the letter. The woman reader turns the letter a little further. One could say that Charlotte Brontë's Villette "reads" Breuer's "Fraulein Anna 0."; George Eliot's " The Lifted Veil" both reads and is read by Studies on Hysteria; reading "The Yellow Wallpaper" through Wollstonecraft, Wollstonecraft becomes its political unconscious; Irigaray reads George Eliot's Mill on the Floss; Kristeva reads Freud's "abjection" of the mother; and so on.
critical analysis of union budget
The extension of economic planning profoundly affected the position of local and republican budgets. The most obvious change was the decline in the proportion of total budgetary expenditure passing through these budgets. This was for two reasons. In the first place, there was a great increase in the proportion of resources devoted to heavy industry and allied matters and financed through the budget--this resulted in a rapid expansion of the Union budget-while the consumer goods industries, and the social and cultural services, which were financed primarily through the republican budgets, expanded more slowly. In the second place, various functions which had previously been financed through the local and republican budgets were transferred to the Union budget during the period of the first five-year plan in order to bring them under the closer control of the Union government.
critical analysis on the glass menagerie
Camino Real represents a mid-point in the artistic development of Williams. He apparently felt it necessary to break out of the mold of his early naturalistic and psychoanalytic studies of suppressed spinsters unable to face reality in a sexual world. He has demonstrated in Streetcar and The Rose Tattoo his ability to create vigorous, earthy, uninhibited portraits, and in The Glass Menagerie his gift for dealing sensitively and poetically with human frustration. If he perceives that surrealism, like the Camino Real, may prove to be a dead-end and returns to psychological realism, there is little doubt that Williams will maintain his position beside Arthur Miller -- the two most important American playwrights of mid-century.
critical analysis on the short story the chrysanthemums
The episode involves a death in a household, in a "close" dwelling-place; and death is dearly another order of fact. It is terminal experience, an experience of nothingness and desolation, and appropriately, there is a certain minimal quality about the whole episode. Nature may still figure as an artistic device (as did the chrysanthemums in the story), but it is Nature in its bare, diminished form. Every piece of description seems to suggest the "end," as well as the characters' conscious efforts to avoid it. There are both direct and indirect references to this. Early in the episode, the ailing Mrs. Morel is carried to the garden where she had earlier spent an entire night among flowers which were then alive and whole.
critical essay a doll house
Most of the stylized features of the large house were preserved: the top hats, the propped-up pillows, the curved-bottomed chairs, the same railroad-track staircase. But in the doll house each of the four rooms contained a roughly equivalent number of objects; an attempt had been made to show the side of the house, presented in a front-face view; a chimney protruded from the top; and there was also a roof. Finally, outside the house stood a few additional features, including two dragonlike figures sailing in the air and a small rectangular apparatus situated between the doll house and the real house.
critical essay barn burning
The humor is completely a factor of this new telling of the tale, for there is none in "Barn Burning"; and the defeat of DeSpain by Ab is not Ab's successful arson but the fact that the concluding scene so obviously belongs to him: burn the barn and then cancel the contract so as to avoid "misunderstanding"! "Barn Burning" is now a story about that quickwittedness and brashness that the men of the hamlet so much admire and enjoy. That this should be the upshot of the barn-burning episode, even as it is the upshot of Ab's horsetrading with Stamper and Flem's bargaining with Jody Varner, is part of the spirit of Book One.
critical essay brave new world
The World Inside's most damaging shortcoming as a utopian novel -- as a manifestation of serious visionary ideas in a persuasive fictional framework -- is that too many of urbmon society's characteristics do not follow logically from its inner nature. The caste system in Brave New World mirrors perfectly the values and priorities of Fordian society, but the class system in The World Inside is simply arbitrary. Nothing in the organization of urbmon life makes class privilege and snobbery necessary or even probable. The only reason equality of sexual access does not produce the same social equality as equal income in Looking Backward or equality of refusal in Eric Frank Russell's...
critical essay fahrenheit 451
n Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury depicts the struggle of the individual against the state, or individualism versus conformity. In the process, despite the overwhelming powers of state control through mass media and technology, he has his hero Montag undergo a process of re-humanization. That is, Montag must shed the influences of the state's monopoly of the consciousness industry and regain touch with his humanistic impulse. In this regard, Bradbury follows the postulates of dystopian fiction as outlined by Scholes and Rabkin. However, there is a curious twist to the "humanistic" impulse of Bradbury which accounts for great contradictions and quasi-elitist notions of culture in Fahrenheit 451.