Charlotte Perkins Gilman v David Foster Wallace - Essay Example

Lecturer: Topic In the Yellow Wallpaper, the story starts with the narrator being blown away by the opulence and splendour of thehouse that her husband chose for their holiday and its surroundings. She gives a description of it in romantic words by calling it an aristocratic estate that has a haunted house and is surprised that they could pay for it and how comes the house has been vacant for a long time. She feels like something is rather unusual about the whole state of affairs that in the end makes her discuss her illness and the state of her marriage. She is in a state of nervous depression and her husband is a doctor and she complains to him but her rubbishes her illness and also all her thoughts and worries. She is a character that is delicate and sensitive is different from that of her spouse that is more hand-on and rational. The treatment of her condition dictates that she is does not engage in active activities and particularly she should not do any writing and working. She is of the opinion that being free and active and doing things that are interesting would aid her illness and also comes clean about how she started her secret journal so that her mind could be calmed. The narrator then starts to describe the house and her description is mostly positive but there are some alarming details the rings in the bedroom walls and the bars that are on the windows. The wallpaper that is in the bedroom, yellow in colour, keeps bothering her since it has decorations that are unrecognizable and she looks at them as disgusting but then her thinking is brought to a stop by her husband John who barges in. The narrator becomes particularly better at hiding her journal as the summer continues to progress and this makes her hide her thoughts from John while she continues to yearn for company and activity and continues to complain about how controlling her husband is. She continues to complain about the wallpaper though that was becoming more unpleasant looking and very intimidating. She goes ahead to indicate that john is concerned that she will become obsessed with the whole thing and that he has refused to pull down the wallpaper and replace it as a way of not surrendering to her irrational worries. The thoughts of the narrator become stimulated and she indicates that she appreciates visualizing people on the paths around the house but her husband continually dejects this kind of imaginations. She then reflects to back when she was a child when things that she saw in the dark got her terrified and describes the bedroom which she thinks could have been a nursery for young children. She states that the paper is torn in particular spots and there are scratches and gorges in the floor and the furniture is heavy then starts to notice a queer pattern behind the main wallpaper before her writing is interrupted by Jennie. Jennie is her sister in law and is there to do the house chores and also care for her. Her family arrives for a visit on the fourth of July and this is exhausting to the narrator only for her husband John to threaten to take her to a doctor known as Weir Mitchell who had dealt with Gilman when he had a breakdown. The narrator spends most of her time all by herself and she states that she has developed a fondness for the wallpaper and she is determined to find out and ultimately understand its pattern. The sub-pattern on the wall turns to be more distinct as her interest continues to develop and begins to like more like a woman creeping behind the main patterns that seem like they are confining her. John denies her the right to leave the house and rubbishes any pleas from her to leave the house. Her interested in the wallpaper continually grows every time her husband does this. Almost immediately, the wallpaper floods the thought of the narrator and her imagination which makes her become selfish and secretive and making her attention to the wallpaper not to be noticed by anyone so that she can discover on her own. She surprises Jennie who was touching the wallpaper and had found yellow stains on their clothes and John mistakes this obsession for calmness reckoning that she is getting better. But she gets very little sleep and is persuaded that there is the smell of the paper everywhere in the whole house and even outside after which she discovers an odd mark on the wallpaper that goes all around the room as if it had been marked by someone going around the room. The sub-pattern has become obvious and looks like a woman that is trying to escape from behind the main one and the narrator sees her shaking at the bars during the night and stealthily creeping in the daytime. She also creeps around at times and has the suspicion that her husband and her sister have a hint of tis fixation which makes her decide to destroy the paper and she starts peeling most of it at night. The following day she is able to be in the house without anyone else and she decides to try and set the confined woman in fury frenzy by biting and tearing. In the end the narrator becomes miserably crazy and is convinced that there are many women that are in the wallpaper and that she also came from there which makes her creep continuously around the room while blotting the wallpaper. Her husband faints when he discovers this after having to break the door into the room and she has to just over him as she continues with her frenzy. On the other hand, the depressed person is a story of a woman who tries to deal with her depression. The story is told in a critical and self-conscious way whereby it brings out David Foster Wallace’s self-conscious side and also his funny and compassionate side at the same time. This story capture the feelings and the mental state of the depressed person and clearly shows that the she hates herself and keeps thinking about it throughout. Further into the story, the self-conscious then begins to approach levels that are absurd and eventually it becomes funny with the pantomime bit that distresses the depressed person because she can only envision someone doing the very same thing to her. The pantomime keeps going on and reaches its highest moment when the depressed person thinks about her therapist who is supposed to double as her confidant. This therapist all over sudden and surprisingly dies and the police report that it is as a result of a toxic combination of caffeine and some depressants. At this point, it becomes evidently clear that David Foster Wallace is just but mocking readers and that none of what has just transpired is to be taken seriously but then, the story gets a new twist. The reprieve that all that had happened was not to be taken too seriously is abruptly and unexpectedly displaced by exhaustion. The story then starts to become overwhelming and the person develops thought that are mentally draining which also apply to the character; the story becomes overwhelming since the persons imagination and thought process becomes mentally tough and demanding and it is the same for the character too. But for whatever reason or maybe the hypnotic rhythm of the writing, which reads like a burst of long feeling, the story always manages to drive the reader along all the way to the end. The depressed person is on the phone with her terminally ill friend, coaxing the friend to let her have it and this words and terms might be applied to describe and assess such a solipsistic, self-consumed, endless emotional vacuum and sponge as she now appeared herself to be. As for the woman’s relationship with her therapist, it involves a dizzying amount of reflection that begins and ends and begins again with the woman’s own selfishness and it is difficult not to be selfish with regard to one’s therapist, as his or her occupation is to tend to the patient’s thoughts, feelings and progress. The therapist can be the best and only friend a patient has, but as a relationship the patient pays to keep, it cannot be as personal or meaningful as she may wish it to be which is derived from a business relationship, one whose definition ensures the whole focus is on the patient. The acknowledgement that the relationship is contrived can be damaging to the depressed person and whether her character is unduly exaggerated, her feelings and experiences are not. There is the thought of an ego centric person demanding that a terminally ill friend to size her up is funny, pitiful and very upsetting which includes a level of hating oneself on the person that is writing the story. He loathes at his own personality so much meaning that he can identify with the character in the story completely. By stating that the character is looking inward and facing herself the author, David Foster Wallace gives clues that this is what is sort of going on throughout the story and he is looking at himself although this remains a bit ambiguous as well. It is easy to find one self in a position that empathizes more with the depressed person who seems less masochistic and needier and to think that isolation isnt just borne out by the psychology of the individual, but heavily by the culture and technology that individual inhabits. This has support in the fact that the therapist, is also depressed though not known to both the reader and the depressed person and ultimately kills herself and that is to say, there is something disturbing and deeply ironic that readers are completely unaware of the therapist’s depression. The footnotes are a formal manifestation and critique of the information age and not only do they manage to pack a single page with an even greater density of info that steal attention but also cause one to forget what is was you were reading in the first place, (Boswell, 206). The depressed person relies on the telephone, furthering the isolation motif and she can hear their voices and the therapist, or the only person she talks to face-to-face has motives that are not genuine, and ultimately she really seems to know nothing about her either. Works Cited Boswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. Print. Read More