Reading critically and interpreting literature Term Paper

Reading critically and interpreting literature - Term Paper Example The Yellow Wallpaper, published in 1892 and written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, charts a young woman's development into deep depression, enabled by her well-intentioned but misguided husband, who is a doctor. The main character, who remains nameless (but may be called Jane, as a reference at the very end of the story, and she will be referred to as such in this essay at times), struggles against the popular contemporary concept of the 'rest cure,' a 'medical' treatment for the â€Å"temporary nervous depression – a slight 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 needs rather than a blanket treatment which oppresses her and worsens her condition. Yukio Mishima's 1966 Patriotism also focuses on a woman's struggle, although his is a very different perspective. Written in the third person, unlike The Yellow Wallpaper which is from the main character's point of view, Patriotism records the evening of a happily married couple's suicide pact, in grim and gory detail. Reiko and her husband reduce their world to their small house, decrease the world's 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 Mishima's complicated feelings on contemporary Japanese morality, resists the classification of a 'struggle,' and a critic is forced to admit that the story's struggle is deeper than vocalization. It appears that it is a tract against suicide, but the author's deep-seated, somewhat twisted love for his country, and the fact that he also chose to commit seppuku, is difficult to reconcile with the repellent nature of this amazingly-written story. Mishima was also an ardent supporter of the samurai honor code. L ike the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper, Reiko's struggle is both gender- and educationally-based, although her experience is more totally a reflection of Mishima's 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 author's respective fears. The setting of The Yellow Wallpaper becomes the focus of Jane's struggle against her husband's 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 descent into madness is the wallpaper – its colour, pattern and even its smell. The narrator and her husband have taken â€Å"ancestral halls† (Perkins Gilman) as their summer holiday home; the â€Å"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 desire to stay in one of the rooms downstairs. The old, â€Å"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 overcome him, nor can she fight against the mores of the society which dismisses her