In her discussion of Mildred Pierce (1945), Linda Williams argues in her essay, “Mildred Pierce and the Second World War”, that, melodrama is able to foreground problems (gender conflicts), encountered by women under patriarchal rule, precisely because it rarely references its historical context. Mildred Pierce is a wartime film that doesn't mention war: WWII. Released the day the troops returned from World War II, Mildred Pierce presents a profound ambivalence towards the career woman. The film
There is no doubt that the future is a powerful political device for politicians, academics, and the general public. We often hear proclamations about a brighter future for our posterity, one where the injustices and inequities of today do not exist. Meanwhile, women, queers, and other historically marginalized groups continue to face subjugation by society at large. In queer theory, Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Theory" and Lee Edelman's "The Future is Kid Stuff" approach the politics of the future
Historical background information about “the Yellow Wallpaper” relies in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper”. In her response to various questions given to her about how she created “the best description of incipient insanity”, the author suffered “a severe and continues nervous breakdown tending to melancholia” the doctor advised her to live a domesticated life. Only after following through her doctor’s advice, did she begin to write, which ultimately led her to recover
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, tells a story of a woman in the early 1900’s suffering from the mental illness hysteria. One of the popular treatments used to cure women with mental illnesses was the “Resting Cure”, which required the patient to be secluded and placed in a bed to rest until cured. The treatment methods used to cure mental disorders at this point in time were not only in-effective, but also made the illness grow worse and caused the patient to accumulate more illnesses
Summary of the essay entitled ‘The Author to her Book’ by Lisa Day Lindsey Day Lindsey focuses on the historical values of Puritan Boston and also enumerates the cultural context in Bradstreet’s poem. She comprises critic’s opinions and alternate interpretations. Bringing to light about the background in which the way ‘The Author to her Book’ and many other of Anne Bradstreet’s poems, provides clarity for the reader and why she uses the metaphor of a child for the poem. Day Lindsey notes Bradstreet’s
In class we viewed multiple articles and advertisements demoralizing the female gender, analyzing the language used in different text types to express gender equality. Specifically, we looked at the he for she speech by Emma Watson. I was inspired by Emma Watson’s speech to explore different situations around the world today where women are discriminated against and oppressed in the media. This led me to explore the effect of police brutality on females in the African American community and how they
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin are two feminist stories that express the problems of married women in the XIV and XX Centaury. Both short stories center on women who in some way are controlled by their husbands and feel obligated to do what they say. The women find some kind of relieve when they are in absence of their partners, showing how oppressed they really were. The Yellow Wallpaper conveys the story of a mentally ill woman who despite
Teresa Johnson one of my classmates, in her essay described an issue of transgenderism. Transgenderism has been a frequently discussed topic lately, and this essay is a great contribution to the collection of discussions. Teresa provided an outstanding explanation of this sensitive and delicate issue, along with possible symptoms of the condition. Moreover, she demonstrated a marvelous effort to illustrate the potential consequences of transgenderism for teenagers. In her essay, she described
“The Yellow Wallpaper” was written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The poem was published in 1899. The poem is about an intellectual woman that feels oppressed and intellectually limited. The woman in the poem is prescribed by a doctor to take “the rest cure approach (Britannica Biographies 1).” The cure implied the woman to “live as domestically as possible (Britannica Biographies 1)”, and forbid her to do what she loved most, write. Ironically it is the very ‘cure’ that drives her to insanity. The
In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” there are various themes that lead to the main conflict of the story. The depressive symptom a woman faces causes her physician husband to treat her for a few months in hopes of helping curing her disorder. Through the use of medication and isolation from the large world, the narrator takes the readers on a journey through her loss of reality. The conflicts freedom, confinement, and madness each have a specific part in shaping the