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Essay on time travel in fiction
Virginia woolf as a modern writer.research paper
Virginia woolf as a modern writer.research paper
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Virginia Woolf’s work, “The Mark on the Wall”, shows the inner workings of the main character’s mind and how her overthinking leads her away from the truth before her. It is a very human trait, showing how sometimes people end up fooling themselves, especially in the search for a cosmic rule to understand when there might not be anything besides its physical reality. Woolf uses a stream-of-consciousness narrative in her writing. “The Mark on the Wall” is full the literary representation of all of the speaker’s inner thoughts. It is very easy to relate to since this is how many people think, wandering and -- largely -- pointless. Every image progresses to another with no explanation as to why. She does this when trying to pinpoint what the mark on the wall is. …show more content…
Then she thinks that it could be “a small rose leaf”, and later it “project[s] from the wall”, and then a “crack in the wood” (2146-2148). She takes this meandering train of thought that both tries to tell her what the mark may be, but pulls her away from the reality. On page 2148, she says, “I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is”, but she doesn’t, possibly because she is enjoying the chance to sit and think. I find myself doing this often, hopefully not away from some truth, but imagining the possibilities. It is an experience that many can relate with, I believe. She is pulled from her thoughts when she realizes someone is looking at her and says, “All the same, I don’t see why we should have a snail on our wall”, to which the speaker replies. “Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail”
Until she sees a woman creeping behind the pattern one night tempting her to go see if the wallpaper is actually moving which is when her husband catches her. He always seems to talk down to her treating her like a child in this particular instance calling her “little girl”. In spite of this she sees this as an opportunity to talk to let him know her concerns informing him that she is not getting better as he so adamantly believes. Nevertheless, her attempts are futile for he dismisses her once more putting his supposed medical opinion above his wife’s feelings. The story takes a shocking turn as she finally discerns what that figure is: a woman. As the story progress she believes the sole reason for her recovery is the wallpaper. She tells no one of this because she foresees they may be incredulous so she again feels the need to repress her thoughts and feelings. On the last night of their stay, she is determined to free the woman trapped behind bars. She begins to tear strips of the wallpaper and continues to all night by morning yards of the paper are stripped off. Her sister in law Jennie offers to help but at this point the narrator is territorially protective of the wallpaper. She locks herself in the room and is determined to strip the wall bare. As she is tearing the wallpaper apart she sees strangled heads in the pattern shrieking as the wallpaper is being torn off. At this point, she is furious and even
...ilar nervous breakdown. As she declares, however, this wallpaper actually saved her from her illness. In her visions from the wallpaper she discerned her own imprisoned mind trying to escape the bars that her husband has imposed on her. No matter how disconnected and how irrational this plot may seem after the first reading, it is a perfectly constructed symbolic recount of the unnoticed changes that take place in people s minds rather in their explicit actions. Thus through a system of symbols with constant connotations, the author conveys a detailed description of her recovery from the realization of her state to the open act of opposition against her husband. Gilman s work is unique not only because of its complex subject such as a deranged person is but mostly because of the subtle inner structure of the plot that reveals the essence of the story.
With nothing that demands her attention, the narrator is left with only the wallpaper to focus herself on. She describes the paper as a living thing and how, “On a pattern like this, by daylight, there is a lack of sequence, a defiance of law, that is a constant irritant to a normal mind.” (Gilman--). She begins to fixate on the paper, to an unhealthy degree, battling with the numbness of her mind that boredom brings. The point where the narrator has truly lost all sense of mind can arguably be when the narrator states, “Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be. You see, I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch. I really do eat better, and am more quiet than I was.” (Gilman----). Although she is eating better, she is losing her connection to reality. As she speaks less to her husband and handmaid, she sinks deeper into the bends and whorls of the wallpaper receding further into her
Ever since she has been entrapped in her room, the narrator’s vivid imagination has crafted fictional explanations for the presence of inconsistencies in the wallpaper. She explains them by saying “The front pattern does move! And no wonder! The woman behind shakes it” (Gilman 9). In the story, the narrator explains the woman mentioned creeps in and about the old house she and her husband reside in. Venturing towards the conclusion, the narrator becomes hysterical when thinking about the wallpaper, explaining to her husband’s sister Jennie how she would very much like to tear the wallpaper down. Jennie offers to do it herself, but the narrator is persistent in her desire-”But I am here, and nobody touches that paper but me-not ALIVE”(Gilman 10)! The narrator has realized the apex of her mental instability as the story
She becomes too weak to write and devotes all of her time to studying the wallpaper. She begins to see shapes in the wallpaper -- to start off with, it looks to her as it is filled with “absurd, unblinking eyes.” The more she examines the wallpaper, the more she sees. She sees a pattern within the initial pattern -- something she describes as “a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure.” She feels as though her condition has not improved and her husband states that he will send her to Weir Mitchell, a well renowned physician, but Jane does not want this. Her mental state starts to decline and she becomes more emotional, crying at almost anything and her obsession with the wallpaper grows, with her becoming determined to find the purpose of the wallpaper’s pattern. The “strange, provoking, formless sort of figure” she initially sees begins to take the shape of a woman, whom she believes is trapped inside the wallpaper. At night when she’s watching this “woman”, she sees her struggling to free herself from the
She is left with no choice but to stare at the wallpaper endlessly and begins to see things within the pattern. She insists there is a woman behind the paper "and she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern-it strangles so" (667). This is representative to women's power being "strangled" by man and that there are women everywhere trying to escape and break free from the suppression and she sees herself as one of those woman behind the wallpaper creeping around trying to get out.
Jane’s husband does not allow her to write because he feels that with her imaginative power and nervous condition it would lead to fancy. “John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies” (Gilman 649) without her outlet of writing Jane begins to see women in the wall-paper creeping around from the inside of the wall-paper to the outside in the gardens. She also feels that the women are trapped behind the first layer of design on the paper as if it was bars keeping them trapped. “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as is she wanted to get out. I got up softly and went to feel and see if the paper did move.” (Gilman 652) Jane also begins to believe that the wall-paper know what it was doing to her “This paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had!” (Gilman 653) Jane starts to relate to the women being trapped in the paper and like she is trapped with-in the bedroom. Jane becomes one with the women in the wallpaper and referrers to the women as I. Jane begins creeping along the baseboards trying to release the women from their prison of wall-paper, which will release her from her
Her tense mind is then further pushed towards insanity by her husband, John. As one of the few characters in the story, John plays a pivotal role in the regression of the narrator’s mind. Again, the narrator uses the wallpaper to convey her emotions. Just as the shapes in the wallpaper become clearer to the narrator, in her mind, she is having the epiphany that John is in control of her.
“There are things in that paper that nobody knows but me, or ever will” (Gilman 483). Using the central symbol of the wallpaper Ms. Gilman allows her protagonist, Jane, to articulate the state of her own mind via her obsession with the wallpaper of her room. The descriptions of the wallpaper change in complexity to reflect the degree with which the Jane’s mind has descended into psychosis. The wallpaper’s description also serves as a visual frame of reference for the reader as the main character begins to hallucinate.
“The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out”, (195). This quote implies to the reader the narrator is feeling trapped mentally. To escape her mental anguish, her imagination has taken over and she is beginning to think there is something trying to get out of the wallpaper. “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern, I mean, and the women behind it is as plain as she can be”, (197). The reader may infer the narrator is feeling more frantic t by the (!) mark she uses in the sentence. And she is becoming more agitated about being alone in her room and the part of the quote, “it becomes bars”, implies she feels like a prisoner. In addition, the quote’s second sentence is more evidence of her illness getting worse; since she now sees a person trapped in the yellow wallpaper who she identifies with. This further confirms supports the facts she is feeling more trapped emotionally and needs to escape from her mental
Signs of the depth of the narrator's mental illness are presented early in the story. The woman starts innocently enough with studying the patterns of the paper but soon starts to see grotesque images in it, "There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a...
“John is so queer now, that I don’t want to irritate him. I wish he would take another room! Besides, I don’t want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself.”(Gilman) She is now imagining the woman out of the paper and creeping around outside. She wants to catch her even though there is no one to even catch, but she doesn’t know that. Her husband is at work all day which gives her the opportunity to creep around, explore and find this woman. Her husband John would suspect her of something if she left the room at night so she must do it during the day. This quote shows symbolism in relation to the fact that the woman in the paper is symbolizing the narrator wandering around outside. Moreover, she is clearly hallucinating about this woman in wallpaper. Her visibility of insanity is quite clear when the author says, “That was clever, for really I wasn’t alone a bit! As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her. I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.” (Gilman) The narrator is imagining interactions that have occurred with the woman she sees in the wall. They begin to peel off all the paper, working together in her mind. She then begins to imagine the wallpaper laughing at her when the sun is out. It can be concluded that her husband should not be taking care of her because he is the sole reason she is insane in the first place. This quote demonstrates symbolism because the woman in the wall represents the psychotic state that the narrator’s husband has driven her to. With this in mind, the narrator becomes connected with the woman in the wall. “I have locked the door and thrown the key down into the front path. I don’t want to go out, and I don’t want to have anyone come in, till John comes. I want to astonish him. I’ve got a
Virginia Woolf's story The Mark on the Wall is very hard to interpret what the author is really trying to persuade. Although David Grau II explained that "she appears to be going deep into the recesses of her mind and reflecting on the meaning of her life, and is using the mark on the wall as her sort of focus point." In which in this case is true since she uses her style of writing of "stream-of-consciousness narration, interior monologue, and meditations on reality, life, history, and thought itself" as Professor Doug David explained. As I was reading The Mark on the Wall, I took the story more so as an imagination of how we view life around us in this world. People have different aspects of how we view and interpret things around us. For Virginia Woolf, just one mark can symbolize many different meanings: "Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or
Through the narrator’s obsession with the wall, she begins to envision a woman, that is trapped behind the Yellow Wallpaper. “By daylight she is subdued, quiet. I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still.” (pg. 166) From this line, it is made clear to the reader that the pattern of the wall symbolizes the social constraints women face daily. While the woman behind the wallpaper is just a figment of the narrator’s imagination, she metaphorically represents the speaker and her desperation to break free of the mental and physical oppression that has been placed upon her not only by her husband but also society as well; this is seen in the line “I suppose I shall have to get backs behind the pattern when it comes night, and that is hard”
The way Gilman describes the wallpaper tells of what the narrator's mind is thinking, 'and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide.';(Gillman 206) She doesn't think this on the conscious level but more on the unconscious level. When the narrator writes, '(The designs) destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.';(Gillman 206) She is speaking of her state of mind subconsciously, the narrator is on the brink of losing her mind at this point. Gillman writes, 'There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down. '(Gillman 207) She was explaining how the wallpaper is like a 'watchdog'; or a guard of some type, watching her every move, naturally making her nervous.