Reading critically and interpreting literature Term Paper

Reading critically and interpreting literature - Term Paper ExampleThe Yellow wallpaper, promulgated in 1892 and written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, charts a young womans development into deep depression, enabled by her well-intentioned merely misguided husband, who is a doctor. The main character, who remains nameless (but may be called Jane, as a refer at the precise end of the story, and she will be referred to as such in this essay at times), fences against the popular contemporary concept of the rest cure, a medical treatment for the temporary nervous depression a tenuous hysterical tendency (Perkins Gilman) which nineteenth-century women were frequently diagnosed with. Her gender- and educational-based fight is against the system, represented by her husband, for a cure which is catered to her own wants and ask instead than a blanket treatment which oppresses her and worsens her condition. Yukio Mishimas 1966 nationalism also concentrate ones on a womans struggle, al though his is a very different perspective. Written in the third person, unlike The Yellow Wallpaper which is from the main characters point of view, Patriotism records the evening of a happily married couples suicide pact, in grim and gory detail. Reiko and her husband cut down their world to their small house, decrease the worlds population to just themselves, and then struggle wordlessly against their own concepts of a peaceful death, both mentally and physically. Their passive acceptance of a frightening situation, a reflection of Mishimas tangled feelings on contemporary Japanese morality, resists the classification of a struggle, and a critic is forced to admit that the storys struggle is deeper than vocalization. It appears that it is a tract against suicide, but the authors deep-seated, somewhat twisted love for his country, and the fact that he also chose to level seppuku, is difficult to reconcile with the repellent nature of this amazingly-written story. Mishima was al so an ardent supporter of the samurai honor code. Like the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper, Reikos struggle is both gender- and educationally-based, although her experience is more totally a reflection of Mishimas internal problems rather than a struggle of her own. This essay will show how setting, tone and irony in The Yellow Wallpaper and Patriotism reveal the struggles enacted through their main women characters, and how these stories reflect their authors respective fears. The setting of The Yellow Wallpaper becomes the focus of Janes struggle against her husbands medical and frankly misogynistic beliefs. It is is the most important motif of the story, in that the narrator believes that the cause of her seam into madness is the wallpaper its colour, pattern and even its smell. The narrator and her husband have taken ancestral halls (Perkins Gilman) as their summer holiday home the place has been empty for years (Perkins Gilman) and as such, presumably, is old and run-down. Jane is enclosed in the large room at the top of the house, even though she fervently expressed a proneness to prevail in one of the rooms downstairs. The old, atrocious (Perkins Gilman) yellow room both entraps her and symbolizes that entrapment John coerces her to stay alone in the room, on the basis of his educational and emotional authority, against her will. Just as the protagonist cannot mortify him, nor can she fight against the mores of the society which dismisses her