As the story progresses the wallpaper begins to acquire powerful associations. What does it come to symbolize at the story’s end?
What will be an ideal response?
- Exploring the complex central image of Gilman’s story, the yellow wallpaper, is essential. The “repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow” (par. 34) wallpaper resists neat allegorical interpretation; it is a troubling, changing symbol of the forces that haunt, imprison, and torment the narrator. At first its “bloated curves and flourishes” (par. 96) seem to have no shape, but gradually the obsessively observant narrator starts to comprehend its form.
In a probing essay, “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America” (Feminist Studies 15:3 [Fall 1989]), Susan S. Lanser compares the narrator’s analysis of the wallpaper to deciphering the text of her own imprisoned female identity:
The narrator is faced with an unreadable text, a text for which none of her interpretative strategies is adequate. . . . But from all this indecipherability, from this immensely complicated text, the narrator—by night, no less—finally discerns a single image, a woman behind bars, which she then expands to represent the whole.
Ask students if they respond favorably or unfavorably to this interpretation, asking them to use specific passages from the story to support their opinions.
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Si impersonale e passivante. Michele, un amico di Ruggero, descrive lo stile di vita a Palermo. Completa le frasi con il si impersonale or passivante.
(mangiare) _____________________________ un buon gelato.
CULTURA Vistas de México. Responde a las siguientes preguntas sobre la cultura de México.¿Cómo se llama el centro urbano más grande de México entre los años 150 y 450 d.C.? a. Quetzalcóatl b. Teotihuacán c. Ciudad de México d. Guanajuato
What will be an ideal response?
Al final de la tarde, los amigos ____________ con un abazo, y después de la despedida, regresan a su hogar.
Fill in the blank(s) with the appropriate word(s).
"When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"--Walt Whitman"When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" - the title and first line of the poem - contains which of the following:
A. Repetition of sounds B. Assonance C. Internal rhyme D. Alliteration