Vicious Wallpaper – Is it out to get us? (Should we hide our kids?)

                Who would ever know that something as generally unmemorable as wallpaper could affect someone so violently?  The short story of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a well-orchestrated tale where such a simple thing indeed seems to drive the narrator mad.  At first it seems that the color and patterns are just mildly irritating to the normal, but perhaps a little unwell, female speaker of the story.  As pages go by, it is obvious that there is much more behind her disgust towards the paper as it develops into a disturbing antagonist who moves and taunts her in the night.  To me, it seems easy to jump to the idea that what she sees in the walls is in fact a distorted reflection of herself.  The way that the layers of the pattern hold back the creeping woman behind is not unlike the bars on the narrator’s window and the manner in which she is entrapped in the bedroom for what surely feels like eternity.  With no exit, anyone would start to lose their mind.  As the room becomes her only home and the idea of leaving it becomes less and less favorable, she probably begins to fear the outside world.  Thus, seeing the creeping woman out the window is related to her containment and this growing obsession with staying in the room.  I remember hearing cases of solitary confinement prisoners where they would often be sitting in a tiny bare room in pitch blackness for 23 hours a day.  Such an environment can quickly bring someone to insanity.  Of course, the narrator’s cell is a little more pleasant than one of these, but the effect can be very much parallel over time.  It seems pretty incredible that her husband could do such a cruel thing to his wife, yet she is so gone that she only sees it being out of love.  It’s often very hard for people to accept that a particular problem may in fact be psychological and in this case they refused to properly address the situation until it was too late.  The fact that they wouldn’t even say what was really going on and she instead lightly referred to her condition as mere nervousness (a name probably given by her doubtful husband) says a lot about their denial.  Even when there’s what seems to be an end in sight, such as moving out of the house, failing to acknowledge issues like this can potentially be very dangerous.  

Essay Summary: "Under the Granite Outcroppings of Ethan Frome"

                In the one hundred years since Edith Wharton wrote the book Ethan Frome, there have been hundreds of essays written on various aspects of the story.  In a particular essay written by Helen Killoran titled, “Under the Granite Outcroppings of Ethan Frome” she manages to take a pretty different look into the morality of the story compared to many previous critics.  Specifically, this essay contrasts with the views of Lionel Trilling’s “The Morality of Inertia” where, in the same distaste as many other critics, he describes how the book is so terribly immoral he could not teach it in his class.  Helen Killoran disputes that Trilling unfairly only looks at Ethan as not making moral decisions and thus dismisses the book.  The backbone of her argument is that Zeena is the true moral compass of the story and so the book cannot be struck with the title of being a “dead book”.  

With some difficulty at first, after reading her essay I soon found myself agreeing with many of Killoran’s conclusions.  Trilling is indeed false in many of his hurried claims that the book is without morals.  It’s not hard to see how he drew this idea since Wharton does a good job of misdirecting the reader away from Zeena for the most part.  There are many complaints against Zeena but none of them have to do with moral flaws.  While hypochondria may be an inconvenient disorder, it is not necessarily immoral.  Perhaps Killoran’s greatest argument for Zenobia having the strongest morals is her relation to the views of stoicism.  Except for her and Ethan’s one larger quarrel, she always acts in a rational manner.  Zeena is wise to everything going on but as she always has, simply endures until she has chosen, with reason, an exact moment to act.  This is seen when she suddenly demands Mattie be sent home and gets her a train ticket which is not really immoral. 

Killoran uses many examples to convince the reader of Zeena’s morals.  Even if a few ideas seem a bit of a stretch, some are very eye-opening with much sense they make.  Besides that, the sheer volume of suggestions she uses has me certain she is right.  Originally, I thought the length of her essay was a bit of an overkill, but now I see that every word brought up a crucial point in her argument.  Trilling had incorrectly focused his critique of morals on Ethan without seeing Zeena’s incredible potential.  A book with as many lively interpretations as Ethan Frome could never be considered the “dead book” Trilling calls it.