The Awakening Article Analysis and Response

The article I chose to analyze for The Awakening was focused on the effect of painting, music, and the arts on Edna and how they are related to her “awakening”. A majority of the article, which I found myself agreeing with, was rather how the arts failed to help or save Edna, in the aspect of saving her life from the social restrictions of the time and herself.

Author Roberta White notes that it’s odd that the readers should naturally think that painting and music would save Edna, giving her an outlet for the things that she couldn’t express, but it does the opposite. There are several ways that Edna fails as an artist, which ultimately lead to her downfall. But before that part of the analysis is mentioned, White makes an ingenious point. Kate Chopin actually incorporates the visual arts into her literature, almost making up for the lack of art in Edna’s life in the story. The vivid descriptions and sensuous language used, especially when talking about the sea (which ties in wonderfully) create a whole new dimension of art for the readers. A very moving line from the article even reads “her suicide seems fated by the language”.

When it comes to Edna herself as an artist, she ultimately is responsible for her own “failure”. Living in New Orleans, there were so many real-life thing that she could have drawn or painted to express herself. By choosing to visually ignore the life around her, she missed out on so much. Relating back to the first point mentioned by Roberta White, the art of the novel itself is superior to the art created in the novel. A major downfall is that her passion and romantic ways distract from her painting rather than contributing to it. She should have harnessed the emotion she had to channel it into something good, but instead it weighed on her.

The arts had much to do with the shaping of the novel The Awakening, in the story line and the actual writing itself. In Edna’s case, the arts failed to save her in her most desperate time of need. Since it was noted that her romantic excursions distracted her from her painting, it is interesting that in the article it also said that Edna liked to get away to the sea with Robert and Arobin because it took her away from her obligations as a mother and to the Victorian social rules, if only for a moment. So though she enjoyed it, the arts is what eventually caused her to commit suicide. 

The Yellow Wallpaper

I enjoyed The Yellow Paper. It was a very unique story that is very well written, but written unusually. The woman who narrates the story was certainly peculiar. The way she talked towards the end of the story almost seemed as if she was schizophrenic. I was not sure if she truly believed that she was the woman in the yellow wallpaper?

On that note, I think the wallpaper represented the woman’s illness. Whether it caused it/contributed to it or not, it was connected in some ways. The more the woman analyzes the wallpaper, the worse her “illness” seems to get. This is also strange, since her outward symptoms seem to get better, at least to the eyes of John and Jennie. As far as the woman’s relationship with her husband, John, I don’t think there really is much of a relationship. He treats her more like a child who he has to watch. Perhaps the lack of proper attention and miscommunication contributed to her illness and fascination with the wallpaper. You can’t just lock someone up in a solitary room all day.

When her illness started to get worse, the tone of the book began to get unsettling. It was like an innocent sort of creepy. The woman didn’t see anything wrong with the fact that there was seemingly a creepy woman walking and creeping around her room at night. Just reading it gave me an uneasy feeling. The history of the room also added to the weird feeling it gives the reader. The fact that it had been used for other things previously and there were markings on the walls, like from the infants in a nursery, gave it an almost ghostly feel.

Overall, I think that the woman went mad, and suffered from a form of schizophrenia, or even multiple personality disorder. Even if she did end up being the woman in the pattern of the wallpaper, she talked about herself from a different point of view.

Ethan Frome Article Analysis and Response

The essay that I chose to read and analyze focused on the Freudian desires of Wharton and her unconscious mind and how it pertains to Ethan Frome. Author Fedra Asya touches on several different interpretations of Wharton’s writing of Ethan Frome, relating it to her past and connecting it to the principles of Sigmund Freud and his belief in the unconscious mind.

Firstly, Asya suggests that Wharton wrote Ethan Frome as a way to express her wishes for an incestuous relationship with her father. Wharton was closer with her father as a child, having fought with her mother often. Based on Freudian theory and the inferences of Asya, she suggests that Ethan Frome was a semi autobiographical work, Ethan being Wharton’s father and Wharton herself being Mattie. It is thought that Wharton confused love and admiration with incestuous desire, because she hadn’t experienced love before the first version of Ethan Frome was published. Sigmund Freud was very keen on the idea of children lusting after their parents, and he said that it was a common and even normal aspect of the human subconscious mind.

Going further into that subject, Wharton branched out in her subconscious while revising her novella. After having an affair and experiencing lust and desire firsthand, Wharton felt a subconscious “guilt” for have had such desires towards her father. The version of Ethan Frome that we read, where Ethan and Mattie are crippled at the end of the story, was Wharton’s way of subconsciously punishing herself. She “unknowingly” made Ethan (Wharton’s father) and Mattie (herself) suffer for her own thoughts of wanting a relationship with her father. Freud would call this a “punishment dream”.

To me, it is astonishing the verity and correlation between Freudian theories and principles and Wharton’s Ethan Frome. It really makes me look at the novella in a different light and adds another dimension of strangeness and also adds depth and meaning.

Ethan Frome imagery blog

"Here and there a star pricked through, showing behind it a deep well of blue. In an hour or two the moon would push over the ridge behind the farm, burn a gold-edged rent in the clouds, and then be swallowed by them. A mournful peace hung on the fields, as though they felt the relaxing grasp of the cold and stretched themselves in their long winter sleep.” (Wharton 69)

Out of the numerous examples of vivid seasonal imagery, I chose this passage because it seemed different than most of the others. What drew me to this passage was that it has a darker tone than the other examples that I came across while reading. I believe that this can either be attributed to the fact that it is indeed night time that is being described in this part of the novel, or it could be a remark on the coming events of the story. When Wharton writes that there was “a mournful peace” hanging over the fields, to me, it suggests a “calm before the storm” feeling.

In this way, I think Edith Wharton uses this imagery to tie into the story. It seems like the passage can be related directly to the strange situation that is brewing between Mattie, Ethan, and even Zeena, in the aspect of it being foreboding.  I love how Wharton uses such powerful words that not only vividly describe the setting and atmosphere of the story, but relate it directly to the storyline.

Also important, I think Wharton used these select words to compare the actions of the night sky and it components to Ethan’s feelings. Just before the imagery passage, Wharton writes about Ethan reminiscing about how he and Mattie longed for each other the night before. The “moon being swallowed by the clouds” could be Ethan’s feelings for Mattie being lost in all of his other emotions and concerns.

Nevertheless, this passage does a great job describing the setting of Ethan Frome. 

Sonnet 147

Sonnet 147 is almost bittersweet. For the majority of the sonnet, Shakespeare declares that he is lovesick for a woman. He says “my love is like a fever” (Shakespeare 1) and he yearns for anything that will prolong his “disease”, which would be the fever. He is desperate for the love of this woman and profoundly hurt because he knows that he cannot have it. The last two lines seem to change drastically, from lovesick and hurt to angry. He says that the woman is not as beautiful and charming as he thought she was, and she is indeed “black as hell and dark as night”. Although, it is possible that he is only saying that out of rage, because he still loves her despite how hurt he is. In my research, I found that this sonnet was actually written about Shakespeare’s alleged mistress, who was in fact African American. This could be a reference to sonnet 130, where he says her breasts aren’t snow white but he loves her anyway, because being extremely white was considered most socially acceptable at the time.

Sonnet 130

There is a slight sense of sarcasm in sonnet 130. It is almost a parody of the other love poems and sonnets at the time, which always compared women to the loveliest things and harped on their beauty. Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 uses simile, saying “My mistresses eyes are nothing like the sun” and metaphor by saying “black wires grow on her head”. To me, saying that a woman is not at all beautiful is a very odd and offensive way to tell her that you love her, but it gets the point across. All in all, I guess the theme of this sonnet is that Shakespeare is telling everyone that he knows this woman is not the prettiest person out there, but he love her no matter what. It is even possible that he wasn’t meaning to be unkind while describing the woman, he was just trying to make a point about the sonnets of the time by mocking them.

Sonnet 129

Sonnet 129 is one of the first of the Dark Lady sonnets. This particular sonnet is one of the more violent and dark sonnets. Throughout the poem, Shakespeare uses all three tenses. An interesting point to be made about the structure of the sonnet is that the first twelve lines of the sonnet are one long sentence. It is almost as if Shakespeare is going on some sort of rant to express his feelings. Also in the first twelve lines, he seems to have very “up and down” feelings. He goes from something negative to something positive and vice versa in several lines before the shift, which happens in line eleven. All of the lines previous to that were expressing Shakespeare’s dislike and displeasure of something. After that, he seems to have accepted love and he realizes that it is the way it is and there is nothing that can be done to change it.