American Literature: Romanticism   Student Midterm Samples 2015 midterm assignment 3. Web Highlights

Carol Fountain

The Sticky Secret behind the Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” has always held a weird fascination for me, particularly because at the first reading, I didn’t know what the heck was going on. That was a long time before I knew the terms, “gothic,” “sublime,” or even American Romanticism. For this reason I chose to review three submissions that had to do with Gilman’s work and gain a deeper understanding of the message behind the story. As in many writings, the author’s purpose is difficult to discern, and this is even more true when the main character is delusional and seemingly going insane.

Danielle Maldonado’s work title “Gothic Elements in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’” is a great place to start. Her writing is clearly focused on some of the most basic images and how they contribute to the gothic romanticism of the story. She does a good job explaining some of the double meanings that Gilman uses: the home, the marriage, the colors, the huge bed and especially the “split personality” of the protagonist and the woman in the wallpaper. If not to be enjoyed for the story itself, it would be a pleasure to document all of the possible double-meanings in many of Gilman’s words. Maldonado’s use of language is colorful and interesting: the words plagued, spawn, deterioration, menacing, and evocative encourage her readers to keep going to see what else she has to say about the short story. Her ability to define the gothic with examples creates a clear understanding of what she means.

Sheila Morris titles her work “What is the Feminine Gothic and Why Should I Care?” which in and of itself is a good reason to look at her submission. She takes research of “Yellow Wallpaper” a step further as she questions the Feminine Gothic and what it means to the Romantic Period. I appreciate the fact that she broke down the steps to her research in order to gain a better understanding of what separates the “Feminine” Gothic from others (funny that there is no “masculine gothic”), beginning with the study of the gothic then continuing into the more specific Feminine Gothic.

In some parts of this essay she may be drawing parallels between feminine gothic and the sublime, relying heavily on the image of fear and its part in the gothic arena. She lost me a little in the fifth paragraph where she mentions many authors and their works, I felt like that was too many passages to ingest in one reading, but it may have been that she was underscoring the fact that there are many references to this sort of gothic available to us, the readers. I appreciate how she connects the forerunners of the feminine gothic to present day female authors.

The third article that I chose to review was also written by Sheila Morris, which was unintentional; the topic attracted my attention first. It is titled, “Where is the American Feminine Gothic Writer today, what is she doing and how is she doing it?” She continues to zone in on the original writers, beginning with Radcliffe, but then offers the names of more recent writers. She groups Gilman in with this earlier set of writers but goes forward with the idea of the American Feminine Gothic continuing into our modern feminist writings, mentioning Stephenie Meyers and Suzanne Collins’ works. I enjoyed the way she segued from one era of writers into the next, and included morsels of information on feminine, dystopian, and young adult literature yet still keeping within the explanation of how the gothic is portrayed in all of them.

It was refreshing to read other opinions of the work being done with the American Romance Gothic. I enjoyed and appreciated not just adding to my own knowledge, but respecting the knowledge that the other students have gained and shared. Their style and their writing is beautifully done and serves as an example to others. It was also nice to explore a vein of writing that we won’t have time for in class and relating the American Romantic Period to modern novels. While “The Yellow Wallpaper” will continue to haunt me, I now have a broader base of knowledge after reading other submissions and connecting “The Yellow Wallpaper” to works of American Romanticism and beyond.