The Symbolism of "The Yellow Wallpaper"

            In the story of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I find that the presence of the wallpaper itself represents one of the largest symbolisms. As story proceeds, it is apparent that wallpaper, which the narrator comes to hate so much, is a significant symbol in the story. I find that yellow wallpaper represents many ideas that consist of the sense of entrapment, the notion of creativity, and a health condition. Indeed, there are multiple ways to interpret the symbolism of wallpaper and I’d like to share some of my own ideas.

            From the beginning of the story, since the time narrator encounters the wallpaper, it is seen as something that drives narrator to interpret and that it affects her directly. Narrator first sees it as unpleasant - it is ripped, soiled, and “unclean yellow.” It contains ostensibly formless pattern, which fascinates the narrator to figure it out using her artistic perception. After staring at it for countless hours, her perception changes drastically. She describes by saying, “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over (Gilman 12).” Her observation suggests the sub-pattern behind the main pattern is visible to be as a desperate woman, constantly crawling and stooping. The woman is looking for an escape from behind the main pattern, which she finds as the bars of a cage. Essentially, the women crawling behind the pattern also show narrator’s feeling of confinement to the wallpaper of her room. Clearly, the wallpaper represents the structure and situation of her status to be trapped in a way to symbolize the domestic life that restricts her from being “free.”

            The association of the color represented in the wallpaper also suggests an important symbolism as well. From what I see, the wallpaper symbolizes the health condition to place on women. Generally, the color yellow represents sickness or weakness by its meaning. The wallpaper’s disgusting yellow symbolizes the narrator’s own “illness”. This sickly yellow strongly depicts its restrictive and unpleasant circumstance, just like the narrator’s “illness,” which is fed by the confinement placed upon her current physical and mental condition. The wallpaper, in fact, makes the narrator more “sick” and worsens in health to the certain extent. The yellow wallpaper, to which I perceive, is a symbol of health screens that women encounter for having placed in such position. Furthermore, I can perceive how wallpaper’s color is “infuriating” and “torturing” from narrator’s suffering perspective under her restrictive placement in the society she lived in.

            To wrap up my idea, I find that these are some of the symbolisms present within the wallpaper itself. The wallpaper is perhaps one of the major symbols illustrated in the story that contains reflective and meaningful representation in regards to the narrator’s status. At the end, I view that this symbolic power of the wallpaper asserts and functions itself with greater prominence until to the point in which the narrator tears it to become “free.”

The Devastation of the Holocaust

            The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick depicts a small Jewish family being sent and living in a concentration camp during the horrific times of the Holocaust. This terrifying event has been embedded into world history and has been retold throughout literature again and again. For example, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas was a the first piece of literature I read in elementary school that depicted different perspectives from two different little boys who were affected by the Holocaust. These two stories both examine, in detail how people were permanently damaged and emotionally scarred by the Holocaust.

            Ozick depicts with great detail the inhumane acts that took place during the Holocaust. In the beginning of the story, Rosa, the matriarch did not know exactly what was going on, but she was still aware of the fact that her baby, Magda would most likely be taken away from her. I understood this as possible maternal instinct and an overwhelming sense of doom placed like a cloud over their heads. Rosa, holding her baby, along with her niece, Stella, is being corralled like animals onto the trains towards the concentration camps. As they progress, Rosa contemplated leaving Magda: “She could leave the line for a minute and push Magda into the hands of any woman on the side of the road… And even if she fled the line for half a second and pushed the shawl-bundle at a stranger, would the woman take it” (Ozick 4). Being the head of their family, Rosa considers any possibility to keep her child safe.

            As I continued reading, each sentence was as bone chilling as the next. Ozick holds nothing back when portraying what life would be like in a concentration camp. The fact that the Holocaust was a real event that eradicated over 11 million people absolutely sickens me.  The ending of the story really resonated with me. Once the soldiers found Magda, I just knew that this was not going to end well. Magda’s death was terrifying and nauseating. Afterwards, Ozick shows us what is running through Rosa’s mind: “She only stood, because if she ran they would shoot, and if she tried to pick up the sticks of Magda’s body they would shoot, and fi she let the wolf’s screech ascending now through the ladder of her skeleton break out, they would shoot” (Ozick 10). Within a mere sentence, Ozick was able to convey Rosa’s mental state. After seeing her child brutally murdered, simply for being alive, Rosa bottles up her emotions on the inside, but remains stoic on the outside. The strength of Rosa as a woman and a mother is conveyed through these last sentences. Anyone who reads The Shawl will remember it not because it was sickening and disturbing, but because it was based on true events that occurred in history.

Definition of a "Good"

            In the story of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” by Flannery O’ Conner, I find that it shows an elusive definition of “good.” Grandmother, who lives with Bailey and his family, strongly depicts the appliance of its meaning in which she indiscriminately labels “good” toward certain person. She also further points out one man as being “good” man and eventually leads to a point where it loses the meaning entirely. Finding this story to be ironical, there are clues provided by the author in regards to this complexity.

            In the middle of the trip, the family stops at a restaurant called the Tower, owned by Red Sammy Butts. Red Sammy complains that people are untrustworthy, explaining that he had been swindled by letting two men buy gasoline on credit. However, grandmother responds to his consequence, “‘because you’re a good man’” (O’ Conner 122)! Here, we can see that she applies the word “good,” though it seems that her usage of word unfits in this situation. Rather, in this case, “good” would mean such as poor judgment, blind faith, and the state of foolishness, in which none of meanings inherently fit to the true meaning of “good.”

            Another significant scene to look at is when family encounters with the Misfit. Recognizing that one of the men is the Misfit, grandmother asks him if he’d shoot a lady, and the he says he wouldn’t like to. Grandmother responds back, “’Listen,’ the grandmother almost screamed, ‘I know you’re a good man. You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people” (O’ Conner 127)! Here, she refers “good” person to the misfit, but this meaning of “good” implies that there is a contradiction in moral code that grandmother and the Misfit adheres. On one hand, grandmother thinks he shares commonality of what it means to be “good” by her definition, but in response, the Misfit denies this. Although grandmother appeals her underlying value of “good” to the Misfit, her definition of “good” is entirely diminished, suggesting her claim that he doesn’t have “common blood” as her. Ironically, at the end, the Misfit, who is labeled as a “good” man, shoots and kills the grandmother.

            Grandmother’s usage of “good” is not necessarily tied with the actual meaning of its word, but it is solely based on values aligned with her own. She considers Red Sammy to be “good” because he takes trust on people and she finds that she can relate to this. Then She calls Misfit as a “good” man because she reasons, he won’t shoot a lady, in which this is a part of value of her own moral code. Essentially, in the mind of the grandmother, the concept of the men that is “good” is defined as someone who takes similar values of personality and morality means as herself, not based on the actual context of its meaning.