Writing Assignment

on

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"

 

Note:  If you are going to print this off in one of the KSU public computer labs, you will first need to go into the File menu at the top of your browser, choose Page Setup and examine the box labeled Black Type. If it is open, click on it (so that an X appears in it). Thke will ensure that colored fonts in this document print out. 

There is a Study Guide to this story.  You should work your way through it before even reading through this Writing Assignment.

You may also wish to review the general instructions on writing assignments.

The wife's condition deteriorates through several distinct stages.  (These may or may not correspond to the divisions in the story punctuated in the text by the device of the horizontal line.  You may see more than one important stage at work in a single one of these demarcated passages, or you may see several of these passages as articulating a single stage in the progression of the protagonist's "case.")  Briefly describe each of these, in a fashion that enables us to appreciate what makes each distinct from those that precede or follow it. 

Conclude your discussion of each with some causal analysis:  

What are we to see as the event (or events) that precipitates the most important change in constituting a passing from one stage to another? 

What are we to see as the most important assumptions on the part of the agents involved (chiefly the wife and the husband, but perhaps more) in bringing about this event, or in causing it to have the effect that it does on the protagonist? 

Are some of these assumptions shared?  Do they end up at odds with each other?  If so, can you detect when they begin to diverge, and how this divergence proceeds?  Or are we instead confronted here with a case in which the same shared assumptions end up having completely different outcomes for husband and wife?

An obvious source of ideas of what the protagonist's assumptions (stable or changing, conscious or unconscious) may be is what she sees in the wallpaper.

Seeing what these assumptions are puts the reader on a footing to tune in to what Gilman may be putting forward in the way of a critique of the culture at large within which the story is set.  It invites us to ask how those assumptions came to be formed in the minds of these agents, and to notice that this is probably not best understood as a matter of personal idiosyncrasy or whim, but as a phenomenon of cultural transmission.  We are led to wonder:  in what ways are these notions likely to have been communicated to the individuals, and reinforced, by social environment? 

Notice that these questions are not addressed, just raised by the story.  This is one important function of ethically engaged fiction:  it need not undertake to suggest an answer to every important question it raises.  These questions may be of an ethical sort, or they may not.  The questions just mentioned, in fact, aren't themselves ethical ones.  They are more "sociological" or "anthropological."  But they are of ethical relevance so long as their answers would help to determine our decisions about what we want to work for or against in our own lives and in the arenas in which our choices affect others.  (Can you detect any genuinely ethical issues that are raised by this story that the reader is left to his or her own devices to decide, on the basis of the kinds of factual possibilities that we are asked to imagine in the story?)

In the essay you are going to write, however, you need not take up these issues raised by the facts (explicit and implicit) that the story asks us to imagine.  Rahter, you are to gear your analysis to clarifying a certain kind of implicit facts of the story:  your job is to detect what the assumptions are that are revealed by the characters' ways of experiencing and responding to what they are confronted with.

• Give yourself enough time!

  A "searching and well-organized essay" on what is revealed about the culture within which the story takes place by this set of changes will require plenty of tinkering -- and more than one draft! It will also probably take at least a full single-spaced page of typed text.

  Consult the Study Guide to this story before attempting this writing assignment.

  You may also wish to review the general instructions on writing assignments.

  Suggestions are welcome.  Please send your comments to lyman@ksu.edu .

      Contents copyright © 1999 by Lyman A. Baker. 

Permission is granted for non-commercial educational use; all other rights reserved.

  This page last updated 18 September 2003.