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diff --git a/markley/14_quiz b/markley/14_quiz new file mode 100644 index 0000000..c6707a2 --- /dev/null +++ b/markley/14_quiz @@ -0,0 +1,84 @@ +Yellow wallpaper quiz + +1. What year was the story published and who wrote it? + +Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote this story and published it in 1892. + +2. What, according to John, is wrong with the narrator? + +John says the narrator has "temporary nervous depression---a slight +hysterical tendency." + +3. What does the narrator's husband do? + +Her husband, a doctor, prescribes drugs and medicines and asks her to +stay in bed at a rented summer estate, barring her from writing, +working, and even going outside. + +4. Where is the narrator writing from? + +She is writing from her bed in the room with the yellow wallpaper, +during the times when her husband/other people are away because they +would prevent her from writing. + +5. What does she see in the wall paper? + +She watches the wallpaper, initially just seeing random jots and lines +that transformed into repeated pairs of eyes and then an array of +funguses, but ultimately, at night, she sees "two patterns," a woman in +back and bars in front. + +6. Freud defines the uncanny as ``nothing new or alien, but something +which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become +alienated from it only through the process of repression'' (10). Explain +how The Yellow Wallpaper is uncanny. Please use direct quotations. + +The Yellow Wallpaper is uncanny because it reveals that the narrator's +repressed concern about the house, ``I would say a haunted house,'' that +John entirely rejects in his ``intense horror of superstition.'' Of +course, the house is ``haunted'' by the creeping woman behind the +wallpaper. The fear of the eerie, yellow-smelling wallpaper and the +house being genuinely harmful is suppressed by a sense of propriety and +the assumption that, according to John, she ``really [is] +better...whether [she] can see it or not.'' The narrator's deep-seated +fears about the therapy and the house are rejected in large part by John +but are ultimately validated. + +7. What characters does the narrator resemble in other texts we have +read? Please give examples. + +The narrator nearing the end of the story is similar to Hyde, an +offputting, unhealthy image that terrifies others (at the very end, she +makes her husband faint from her creeping about the room). But at the +beginning, she has a somewhat critical view of her husband and of the +medicine he practices, which correspond to Watson and his passive +criticism of Sherlock's cocaine "habit." She is reasonable in, for +example, her not outright rejection of faith and careful superstition, +unlike her husband or Sherlock Holmes whom appeal solely to rationality. + +8. What genre is The Yellow Wallpaper? + +This is a feminist allegory, written as a horror story. + +9. Why do you think the author chooses the verb "creep" so many times? +Please give direct quotations as evidence. + +Gilman uses "creep" to show the narrator's weakening and tiring from +being holed up in the room so long. The narrator wants to creep because +she hasn't the strength to leave. `` `Open the door, my darling!' `I +can't,' '' shows that the narrator is physically weak, just like the bars +being ``too strong to even try [to leave].'' It also shows the narrator +becoming meek, wanting to become like the woman who ``creeps by +daylight'' and ``hides under the blackberry vines.'' This correlates the +narrator being forced in the house with her descent---not exactly into +madness but into ``awfully lazy'' feebleness and unhealth. + +10. Based on references in the story, describe "the rest cure." Why do +you think doctors prescribed it? + +"The rest cure" is a prescription to avoid any manual labor or exercise, +or even going outside, and it was probably prescribed to "hysteric" +women because of beliefs that they were fragile and that they would be +healthier if they avoided disturbing stimuli. It might also be that +nervousness was treated like a physical disease comparable to the flu or +a cold because those are often treated with rest. |