The Yellow Wallpaper, A Jury of Her Peers, and Fight Club

I find it ironic that in both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “A Jury of Her Peers” the main character sees themself through something else.  The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” begins to identify herself with the woman in the wallpaper.  In “A Jury of Her Peers,” Minnie Foster sees herself as a canary. Both of these stories are very symbolic. I didn’t really enjoy either of these and I didn’t like that these stories both themed around crazy women because it portrays women poorly. Although the idea of women’s rights hadn’t really been established yet so, I guess it makes sense for the writers to see things this way.

In the movie, Fight Club, the narrator begins to identify with the mysterious Tyler Durden. The narrator meets Tyler on a plan flight and soon after, his perfect little world starts falling apart. He had been going to support groups to help him sleep because they helped him to find his happy place but when he gets back (after meeting Tyler) this lady named Marla Singer starts attending ALL of his meetings. Once she starts appearing, he can’t go to his happy place because he knows that she knows that he is a phony. This movie is dark and keeps up the grotesque as Fight Club keeps the fights pretty gruesome. I found it hard to watch some of the fight scenes just because some of the guys would get beaten so badly.

A Streetcar Named Desire, A Goodman, and Where Have You Been

In the Film, A Streetcar Named Desire, our leading lady, Blanche, is nothing short of crazy. This seems to follow with a theme I’ve noticed in Southern Gothic literature. There are almost no ghosts but the stories seem to revolve around people who are not completely all there, mentally that is. Blanche attempts to pass herself off as a frail woman of upper class but we eventually find out, this is all a façade as she is single and has lost her family’s estate. To society at this time, that is a failure.

In “A Goodman is Hard to Find,” the grandmother uses her perfect Christianity to try and stop a murderer from killing her family. But in the end, she realizes that she is not that much different from the murderer himself and attempts to form a connection with him. She uses a metaphor to describe the murderer (The Misfit) as her son and to further this connection, the murderer puts on her son’s shirt in the end after killing them all.

In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” adventurous Connie finds herself in a heap of trouble as a man named Arnold Friend shows up at her house to take her away.  He threatens to murder her family if she doesn’t agree to come along. She resists at first but eventually finds herself giving in because she has no way out.

I didn’t care for A Streetcar Named Desire but, I really liked “A Goodman is Hard to Find,” and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been.”  To be honest, crazy Blanche just got on my last nerve. The other two stories were so much more interesting and I really liked that there was a sense of danger.

From Faulkner to Woolson

Since I have read some of Faulkner before, I was actually a bit more interested in reading “A Rose for Emily.” It was no surprise that this novel was themed around death as most of his work is dark and as usual, the story wasn’t told through the eyes of Emily, but through the eyes of the town. I think he does this to create more suspense. If I would have known what Emily was thinking the whole time, I wouldn’t have wondered if maybe the town people has suspected right all along.

As for “Old Gardiston,” I found this one a little less interesting. It was set during the civil war and embodied some of the conflict between the north and the south. Although, we were given a glimmer of hope at the end when Gardis marries Captain Newell because this is a picture of the joining of the north and south.

Both of these stories had political elements because they were based around conflicts of the time: old south vs. new south and north vs. the south. Keeping with the Southern Gothic theme, there was of course an aspect of grotesque in these stories, especially in “A Rose for Emily,” when we find that she was keeping the corpse of her dead lover in the house.