After Professor Clark\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s discussion on point of view at the recitation, I decided to look at point of view in the story we were assigned to read for Thursday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s class, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Yellow Wallpaper.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d My initial reaction was that this woman was crazy and had some form of post-partum depression. We read an account of a summer at an \u00e2\u20ac\u0153ancestral hall\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (513) through her eyes, or rather her words, since this story is what she writes while her keepers are away.<\/p>\n
Throughout the short story, the reader knows only what the narrator writes down. Everything we see is through her eyes and what she decides to keep record of. Several times she speaks of writing this specific account and of how her husband \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hates to have [her] write a word\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (515). Thus, whatever occurs outside of the furtive writing is known only to the reader by how she relates it. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a skewed situation. Her husband appears to be very doting and caring, but at the same time a little obsessive about her rest and condition, probably because he is a doctor.<\/p>\n
In the lecture, Prof. Clark discussed the paradox of narration, that a narrator may be unable to interpret his or her own reality. I think this is definitely the case in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Yellow Wallpaper.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d No where does the narrator mention her exact condition \u00e2\u20ac\u201c she seems oblivious to most medicine and care. She is also unable to see that her hallucinations of women behind the hall and around the house are absurd. Because she is afflicted with an illness and because she is telling her own story, the narrator does not understand the apparent severity of her condition.<\/p>\n
This leads me to wonder what \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Yellow Wallpaper\u00e2\u20ac\u009d would be like if the narrator\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s husband John narrated the story. Would it be methodological, like a doctor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s notes? Would it be about a husband\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s despair as he watches his wife fall apart? Clearly, point of view plays a huge part in how we read and interpret a story.\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
After Professor Clark\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s discussion on point of view at the recitation, I decided to look at point of view in the story we were assigned to read for Thursday\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s class, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The Yellow Wallpaper.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d My initial reaction was that this woman was crazy and had some form of post-partum depression. We read an account of a … Continue reading Point of View in “The Yellow Wallpaper”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2006\/325\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2006\/325\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2006\/325\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2006\/325\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2006\/325\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2006\/325\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2006\/325\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2006\/325\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2006\/325\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}