The Chrysanthemums

Believe it or not, I never knew that "Mums" stood for "Chrysanthemums" but I at least knew that they were flowers. But that is beside the point.

 

This story was indeed one that I will remember because I feel that I understood it better than most. The married woman with no children liked to work in her garden, and she seemed content with this. But, throughout the story it seemed that she simply longed to be viewed as an equal by her husband, as well as everyone else. The setting is described to be rather desolate and isolated from society, as well as enclosed with fog. I presume that this description was foreshadowing her feelings towards her life. She felt entrapped by the way she lived her life (or lack thereof). I viewed her responsibilities as low level and very routine. Anyone would get tired of gardening every day and domestic chores, right? Not to mention, she craved any kind of praise or recognition for her existence but never received any. The man who manipulated her into paying for his service did so by playing with her emotions (Just like every man). After convincing her that he wanted her flowers for a good purpose, he almost immediately threw them out onto the dirt road. Sadly, these Chrysanthemums were the only thing that she had passion and love for; Therefore, when she saw her prized possessions thrown onto the road she took this to heart and this proved her hypothesis that men are animals. At the end, this is why she preceded to ask her husband about the fights in town that men would engage in and ended up crying secretively. I believe that she realized that she was nothing like them and felt that her battle for equality was futile, after all.

The Yellow Wallpaper

As usual, I laid in bed the night before class and read this story, The Yellow Wallpaper so that it would be fresh in my mind for discussion the next day. It was longer than some excerpts, but very abstract and interesting (like most that Sweeney assigns) and had an intriguing ending that left you wondering. In summary, my perspective of the story was a woman who had [recently?] been told that she was "sick" by everyone that she loves. Though, her husband still gives her hope that she will get well, she is not allowed to do anything (even so much as write her feelings down). She is ordered to stay in a huge deteriorated room in which she is unfamiliar with to entertain herself for months on end. As if this does not sound excruciatingly miserable enough, she has had her child taken away from her to be cared for by another woman (which is most likely for the best, but is still depressing for her). On the defense of her husband, I believe that in this time when people were expected to be "chronically depressed" or insane that physicians thought that confining someone who is in this mental state to oneself would possibly be the only way/ or perhaps the "cure" to the depression/anxiety/insanity. But, over time we have learned that this solitary confinement method will only drive a person completely crazy, and really do more harm than good. The ending was certainly eery, and all of the possible interpretations of the conclusion are not happy endings. But I still appreciated reading the woman's insight of the experience documented through her secretive entries that she wrote throughout the process of her losing all sense of reality and in the end, truly believing that she was inside of the wallpaper itself.