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+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.