I’d like to periodically add a sample of my college papers. I read some interesting stories, and I want to share what I had to analyze. I may not post my final papers, as they were anywhere between 8 and 25 pages long.
LIT 300: Literary Theory
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
While trying to deconstruct the text of The Yellow Wallpaper, it was difficult to figure out what angle to approach the reading. Using the Poststructuralist Theory, it’s important to notice that there is not one single way to analyze the text. Deconstructing, according to Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), means looking for another meaning than what the text originally is intended to mean. However, différance, a term made up by Derrida, basically means that a text can hold many different interpretations, so there are a lot of different ways to compare how the text is read.
However, when analyzing the literal wallpaper in the story, it is more than just yellow, partly stripped off, and a dull color. It can represent the woman, the narrator, of the story. She is not sickly, according to her physician husband, but does have temporary depression. He insists she only needs rest. As the story progresses, she gets more agitated, stuck in a nursery room, with the yellow wallpaper. The narrator begins to see a woman stuck in the wallpaper. As with the woman in the wallpaper, the narrator feels trapped. She’s trapped, not only in the nursery room, but in her body. Her mind is always thinking. The narrator wants to write, but only can secretly. She wants freedom, but is stuck in the room, by her husband and the nanny. By the end of the story, the woman finds her freedom by peeling down the wallpaper, freeing the woman trapped in the wallpaper, which, is herself.
My interpretation of the story is shaped as someone that has had experience with depression. Hence, when deconstructing the story, I could see the wallpaper, yellow and dull, as representing the main character, the narrator. As she describes the wallpaper, she could be describing herself. The bars on the windows in the room, help the illusion that she is trapped in her own reality. I am looking at it from one view, but using different lenses, someone could construe that the narrator is in an actual mental institution and not a summer home. Another person could be less literal and use feminism to talk about the timeframe the story was written. Also, there is a possibility of reviewing this story from the husband’s point of view. I agree with Derrida that there are so many different variations that cannot be one right answer.
Laura J Bembenek, Author 