Overactive Imagination

For any writer, a vivid imagination can be not only the greatest gift, but also the most terrifying curse. Catch a writer daydreaming and immediately, one can assume that said writer is creating entire worlds behind the typical distant gaze. The slightest inspiration can spark entire volumes of fictional characters and situations. Unfortunately, such an ability can prove dangerous. As exemplified in the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, an imagination stuck on just one subject can insight anywhere between a loss of focus to total insanity. The main character, left with no outlet for her creativity, was forced to occupy her mind with a horrid pattern on the yellow wallpaper that covered her room; in the end, it drove her to insanity.

The narrator’s husband, a physician named John who loves his wife dearly, is unknowingly the cause of her downfall. Because she suffers from “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” (9), her husband has commanded that she does not write at all and remain in bed for as much of the day as she can. Such orders have devastating consequences for a woman with such a big imagination. Our first clue about her creative ability comes in the very beginning of the story, when she clings to the idea that the mansion they have moved into is haunted. Forced to rest all the time, the poor woman is looking for anything to occupy her mind. Once she is moved to her room, the narrator immediately tells us about the wallpaper, “one of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” (32). As the story picks up, the narrator talks less about the house or John and more about the wallpaper. We are forced to stare at it with her, trying to follow its terrible curves and drops and stops, all the while writhing in the wretchedness of its yellow color. As time passes on, the wallpaper gains a disgusting allure; the narrator “[follows] that pattern by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics” (93). When she is not talking of the decoration, the narrator tells us about how she is not supposed to be writing. She has to hide her work whenever John or one of the servants comes to check on her. While she secretly writes on occasion—“But I must say what I feel and think in some way—it is such a relief!” (105)—we can easily detect the guilt she feels for doing so. Thus deterred from using writing as a relief and release for her imagination, the narrator spends more and more time trying to decipher the wallpaper.

Near the final month of the couple’s three-month lease on the house, we finally learn of the narrator’s growing hallucinations. Her insanity begins when she imagines seeing a “woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern” (121). At first, the creeping woman is a casual mention, something easy for us to understand. Our eyes can easily play tricks on us if we stare at an object for too long. The narrator, however, begins to talk more about the shapes she is discovering in the wallpapers; she becomes more convinced that the woman in the wallpaper is real, not just a trick of the eyes. Her imagination, forced to contain itself almost entirely in her upstairs room, clings to the idea of the wallpaper containing a deeper mystery. She has lost control. The narrator, so imprisoned by an illness that no one can make sense of, is consumed by the idea of another woman imprisoned by a pattern that no one can make sense of. The creeping woman hides in the daylight, but “in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard” (187); similarly, the narrator pretends she is not miserable when anyone is around, but as soon as she is alone, she too shakes her metaphorical bars. Every piece of information that we are told about the creeping woman can be paralleled by the narrator’s life.

By the end of the story, the narrator has been driven completely crazy by the multiple physicians’ attempts to suppress her imagination. She has completely lost touch with reality and can no longer distinguish between herself and the woman trapped inside the wallpaper. Her desperation to escape her own prison of boredom drives her to “free” the woman. In a sense, she is living out her own desire through the character of her imagination. By slipping into the mind of the creeping woman, the narrator’s room turns from a symbol of imprisonment to a symbol of freedom. The power of the narrator’s imagination—focused only on her delusions of another being longing for escape from the patterns in the wallpaper—leads to her ultimate downfall. (809)

The Wrong Path

Note: The spelling errors in the quotes are not careless errors on my part; they appear in the story as such.

Of all the factors present in our lives, none can so completely affect or alter our final outcome as much as the element of choice. For centuries, choice has been an object of debate—what is free will, what is destiny, and can they coexist? If we choose the wrong path, will there be any way to retrace our steps? Authors have tackled such questions in great multitudes. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find”, Flannery O’Conner gives us a small glimpse of a man named Misfit and where his choices have led him. However, what originally seems to be just an account of an emotionally disturbed criminal can, on deeper inspection, be viewed as a parable about the affect choice has on our lives.

The Misfit first comes in contact with the main characters after they have had a car accident that leaves them stranded on a deserted road in Georgia. After a few tense minutes of strange conversation, the Grandmother screams that she recognizes the Misfit as the murderer from the newspapers. Unfortunately for the family, her outburst might be the reason they are all killed in the end, as is hinted when the Misfit says, “but it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn’t of reckernized me” (84). Instantly, the story’s pace accelerates. Misfit’s accomplices take the father and the son out to the woods to kill them while the Grandmother, who seems panicked and unable to think clearly, starts shouting at the Misfit that he is a good man. He responds nonchalantly, “Nome, I ain’t a good man” (100), leading the reader to wonder if his morality is something he’s forced himself to accept. His easy response sounds almost automatic, pre-rehearsed so that he could give it quickly, without having to think about the deeper meaning. His acceptance that he is not a good man is further illustrated when he denies Jesus and declares, “I don’t want no hep…. I’m doing all right by myself” (122); he is stubborn because he doesn’t want to admit that there is another way to live his life. His quick dismissal of there being any good in him at all—any shred of evidence of another side to him—shows just how much he is trying to ignore a part of himself. To acknowledge that he has a good side, or at least some good in him, would be to acknowledge that he had once made a choice—he could have followed his heart in either direction, good or bad. He doesn’t want to regret his choice to live his life by the darker side of his soul, and so he denies that he ever had a choice by proclaiming that there was never any good in him.

Not until the end of the story does the Misfit finally allude to having a choice in life. The grandmother is desperately trying to tell him to pray to Jesus in order to find the good in himself, but the Misfit seems almost lost in his own world. His first mention of a choice is when he tells the grandmother, “if [Jesus] did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can” (135). In a sense, he’s shifted the blame to Jesus; if he had any proof that Jesus had truly raised the dead, then of course he would follow Jesus and be a good man. Because he has no proof, however, he believes one’s faith determines how they will live their life. He is trying to convince himself that he doesn’t believe Jesus raised the dead, which is why he is living his life in “meanness” (135). His uncertainty becomes perfectly clear, however, when he says to the grandmother, “It ain’t right that I wasn’t there because if I had been there, I would of known…. and I wouldn’t be like I am now” (137). Through the quote, the Misfit accidentally expresses his wish that he had solid proof of Jesus raising the dead because the proof would have given him a reason to be a good man. His emotions are bursting out of him right then; he has likely forgotten that he’s talking to the grandmother at all. He seems like he has tried to forget that he once had a choice and that he personally elected to follow a life of meanness, but the grandmother’s persisting that he is a good man has forced his regret to the surface. He is so lost in his self-confession that it is not until the grandmother touches his shoulder that he is snapped back to reality and shoots her. After his sudden awakening, he immediately puts his guard back up, forcing himself to be numb to his own acts of meanness. However, his final declaration of regret, which only us readers can understand for what it is, occurs when Bobby Lee says that he sees “[shooting the grandmother] every minute of her life” (141) as fun. The Misfit retorts, “Shut up, Bobby Lee…. It’s no real pleasure in life” (368), an inference to his reluctant belief that if he had chosen to be a good man, not a murderer, he might have actually found some “real pleasure in life” (368). (917 words)

Hopes Laid to Waste

While I was reading “Teenage Wasteland,” I was struck by how many different techniques the author used to break our hearts. In telling the story of one young boy’s downfall, Anne Tyler brilliantly uses the power of hope to disguise the ending. Though she capitalizes on many different scenes, moments, and methods to give the story its depth, Tyler’s greatest achievement is the reaction she evokes by telling the story through the eyes of the mother.

From our first impression of Daisy, we feel sympathetic towards her. Right from the beginning, Tyler portrays Daisy as a woman who has good intentions but can never quite pull it all together. Our first image of Daisy is that of her “clutching her purse” (2) and feeling ashamed as she sits on the principal’s couch, listening to him talk about Donny’s shortcomings. We see Daisy’s attempts to help her son, such as supervising his homework, and easily share her disappointment in his minimal efforts. Daisy is, in fact, so caught up in helping Donny that she has little time for anything else. Her daughter is ignored, and Daisy usually starts supper late. All within the first page, Tyler paints the portrait of a struggling mother who is completely exhausted from trying to help her son, frustrated by his lack of improvement despite her sacrifices, and unappreciated for her efforts.

As we watch and sympathize with Daisy’s struggles, the continuing bad news about her son becomes even harder to bear. After two pages of no progress, we logically cling to Donny’s tutor, Calvin Beadle, as our hope for the boy. To hope for Donny’s progress is to hope for his mother to not feel so defeated. Tyler feeds us bits and pieces to raise our spirits, such as Donny’s teachers noticing and commenting on his attitude improvements. Unfortunately, all-too-quickly, the story takes a turn for the worse: Donny’s grades are slipping, Cal and his students are becoming increasingly questionable, and finally, Donny is expelled. As we read, we can only anticipate the disappointment Daisy must feel. Strangely enough, Tyler describes Daisy’s physical actions and inner dialogue much more than her actual emotions. We are left to fill in the blanks.

An interesting question concerning “Teenage Wasteland” is why Anne Tyler chose to tell it through Daisy’s eyes. Though the story is in third person, Daisy is clearly the main character, and we are made to follow her take on what has happened. Tyler, however, could have easily told the story from Donny’s perspective, in which case we would probably not sympathize with Daisy at all. From his point of view, Daisy would be controlling and oppressing; Donny says his parents, “acted like wardens” (34). Through Daisy’s eyes, we start to feel a little bitter towards Cal, the way wins over Donny’s affections, and the way he replaces Daisy. In the eyes of Donny, however, Cal would be a hero, the one adult who believed in him and understood him. Instead, Tyler wants us to see Daisy’s struggle. She tells us how Daisy lays awake at night, wondering where she went wrong. We are not made to see Daisy’s mistakes. We’re supposed to see how hard she works, how much she loves her son, and how much she’s willing to give up for him. Daisy is what Donny would call “controlling” because she wants to keep her son safe. We can appreciate how tough it must be for her to turn the power over to Calvin. Donny, however, shows no appreciation; he continues to call her controlling just to get what he wants. Despite Daisy’s every best effort, she just cannot do anything to get ahead. With the story told from Daisy’s point of view, we ignore any other character’s struggles; we care only about Daisy.

At the end of Tyler’s rollercoaster, we are given one last peak of hope: Daisy takes back the control. She resists manipulation on the part of Donny and Cal, both of whom are arguing that the beer and cigarettes found in Donny’s locker were not his fault. Rather than rushing to do anything to prove to Donny that she trusts him, Daisy finally listens to her own common sense. She enters him into a public school instead of the Brantly School mentioned by Cal and Donny, then withdraws him from his tutoring sessions with Cal. We start to hope that Daisy’s ability to finally take a stand will lead to improved conditions with her son. Such hope, however, is short lived. The worst tragedy of all hits us the moment we learn that Donny has run away. Suddenly, every struggle we fought through with Daisy becomes meaningless. Despite her every effort and all our sympathy, she has lost her son. The story closes with Daisy still wondering “what went wrong, where they made their first mistake” (112). We have been given just enough small glimpses of hope throughout the story that such an ending is truly heartbreaking. By telling the story from the mother’s perspective, Tyler uses every technique possible to make the story a hauntingly powerful and sad recount of human failure. (854)