Response to Susan Glaspell's "Trifles"

This story struck a lot of sparks in class, so I'm just going to skip the usually summery and jump right in--in terms of the ethical right/wrong actions of Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale, I would have to make the call, that if I had to make the call, I would say that they did the wrong thing by hiding the evidence (the dead canary). However the case, it's totally not because of the reason they had for hiding it--whether of not to protect Mrs. Wright from a harsher trial because she had been wronged for years and driven to murder is a most complicated choice to make, and it's hard if not impossible to call either one (hiding or divulging the possibly incriminating evidence) the right or wrong decision...

Which, in a way, is exactly why what Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale did was wrong--they made an extremely morally grinding decision based on very little other than their own rushed personal conclusions--conclusions based mostly on a almost romantic take the circumstances which lead to a chilling murder committed in cold blood. Over the course of the play, the two women speculated and speculated, drawing conclusions and reminiscing about the romantic good old days, and ended up turning a very real murder into a fantastical tragedy--one that could nearly be played out as a drama similar to "Trifles" itself. Therefore, I think that while maybe the nature of their decision could be right under circumstances, the reality of their actions are that they didn't have enough real facts--concrete knowledge--to make the kind of call that they did. In short, the two women made a life-altering judgment call from how they felt about what happened, and not on what they knew actually happened--most odious.

On the other hand, after writing this, something else totally hit me (square in the face--not), I realized that if, say, the two women did end up divulging the evidence and gave the dead bird to the attorney and the sheriff, the same thing could happen from the other perspective--the attorney and the sheriff could use the canary and make up their own story to overly incriminate Mrs. Wright--essentially do a similar wrong as the two women did--using their own feelings and prejudices on strictly surrounding the dead bird instead of basing her trail on the big picture--weighing all evidence equally. However the case, that last bit was total speculation, and was totally not thought through.

To wrap up this post, I'd have to say that the more we delved into Glaspell's "Trifles" the more I began to understand it. My first read through left me with a most detrimental attitude--I was totally discouraged by the actions (which I then perceived as arrogant, as, to some less degree, I still do) of the two women in the story, and while I still believe that they most definitely messed up, after hearing the debate in class, I feel like now I have a better grasp on it--or, at least, less detrimental.

Response to Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper"

Spooky. This was a most odious piece to read. Gilman totally captured the slow deterioration of a mind slipping into insanity. "The Yellow Wall-Paper" opens with the main character, a women suffering from what appears to be postpartum depression, or at least just extreme anxiety, explaining in the first person, as if she were writing in a journal, to the reader how she and her husband "John," whose a doctor, just moved into a large estate for three weeks, so she can recover. Apparently, Dr. John believes that the best thing for his wife is solitude and seclusion, away from the outside world.

However the case, this totally turns out to be a bad call, as it leaves the writer (who also isn't supposed to write--another part of her husband's prescription) no choice but to live inside--inside the world of herself, which turns out to be most detrimental to her health and mental well-being. Over the course of the piece, divided up into journal entries that supposedly the woman writes while no one is watching, she falls deeper and deeper inside herself, into her obsession with the grotesque wall-paper plastered on the walls of her cell-like bedroom, until, at the story's horrific conclusion she completely looses her mind to it.

In class, a few people made the point that in a way, in her own way, lacking control of her life and her situation, she takes control and escapes with it in the only way she can in a sort of bleak take on freedom. However the case, after reading it, I walked away with the opposite impression--loosing her mind wasn't an extreme case of freedom; it was actually an extreme case of oppression. The poor woman wasn't at last escaping her situation, she was locking herself into it forever. Yeah, definitely a most odious piece to read for sure.

Response to Edith Wharton's "The Other Two"

Edith Wharton's "The Other Two" really caught me off guard. When I started it, just after reading Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," I was expecting the same kind of Roald Dahl style writing--with the expected folding suddenly into the unexpected or the strange, or both, like Roald Dahl's short stories in Lamb to the Slaughter (1953), Kiss Kiss (1960), or Switch Bitch (1974).

So when I finished, naturally, the conclusion had me a little puzzled--while reading the story, I had felt like the writer was gearing me up for some kind of twist (writing the details and the mundane but with sinister motive, again like Roald Dahl) some kind of big conclusion, maybe not as Twilight Zone-esque as the twist at the end of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," but still a twist none the less. Particularly, it seemed like the story was going to end with some sort of major change--like say, Alice leaves Waythorn or visaversa--or even some bigger, more intense and unexpected change or conclusion--more in the "strange" Roald Dahl direction. However, in the end, Edith Wharton's "The Other Two" concluded more or less as relaxed as it started, being more about personal and emotional conclusion than a plot-tied physical one.

I ended up rereading "The Other Two" after class the other day, this time with a more open mind, and without expectation for the Twilight Zone resolution I knew now wasn't going to be there. I most definitely got more out it--it seemed like the piece ended up being just a simple account of man, Waythorn, changing his outlook. "The Other Two" opens with Waythorn being totally uncomfortable even with the mere idea of having to meet either of his wife Alice's two ex-husbands (a la "The Other Two"), and being totally and completely infatuated with her, and over the course of the story, with the other two men, Haskett and Varick, becoming increasingly unavoidable in his life, Waythorn eventually comes to terms with how things are and how thing will have to be, seeing both men for who they both actually are, as well as seeing his wife for who she actually is, under a less blinding light. The twist is the transformation of Waythorn's perspective--moving from, in a way, rejecting his situation to accepting it.

Response to Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

Whoa--"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" had a most unexpected conclusion. In fact, to write about it now, after finishing it, I'll have to reexamine everything I thought I knew about it, and everything I thought that I thought about it. For one, I had originally thought that the story was solidly plot--a tale of a southern "well-to-do" planter's escape from a most heinous death, i.e. death by hanging.

However the case, it turned out that none of that, what I thought the story was about, actually happened. In other words, Peyton Farquhar's (the "well-to-do" planter) totally elaborate and heroic escape (untying his bonds, dodging bullets, swimming to freedom, and cross country hiking back to the safety of his own home) never really happened--when the military sent him off the bridge to hang, the rope didn't actually break, leading to the series of events just listed--instead the noose actually held fast, and Farquhar died right there, on the spot--no escapes, no heroics.

It turned out that the real story was not the heroic escape but actually just the harsh honest truth of a wealthy want-to-be hero, who got out of actually fighting in the civil war because of his social standing and money, and whose embarrassment for doing so along with his fragile concept of reality let the already shallow man get tricked into running straight into enemy territory (he thought he was setting off to do some dangerous secret Confederate opp--he was dead wrong) and getting hanged.

Looking back, I can't help notice the hints that Bierce left, however. For instance, Bierce kept mentioning how Farquhar was feeling pain, "His neck was in pain and lifting his hand to it he found it horribly swollen," and how his mind was getting more and more lost, "...despite his suffering, he had fallen asleep while walking..." (both page 306, 4th paragraph). Finishing the story, Twilight Zone twist and all, made me really dig the Realist style of literary writing--"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" was chalk full of information and detail, telling you everything you needed to know as a reader, and so letting you jump to your own conclusions and interpretations, making the last plot-altering piece of information that much sweeter, that much more surprising (or not, depending on if you picked up on the details like some had in class--myself not included) as well as making the total experience reading the story that much more outstanding.

Response to S.O. Jewett's "The White Heron"

I thought "The White Heron" by Sarah Orne Jewett was especially great because of the way she wrote the main character Sylvia--with such total trueity. I feel Jewett really captured exactly what it was like to be nine years old. In fact, Sylvia reminded me a lot of what my own little sister was like when she was about that age, and, actually, when I was that age as well. In terms of writing style, I feel like she wrote "The White Heron" most spontaneously, almost like the way kids think--totally in the moment, and then already onto the next. Like on page 416, at the end of the 2nd paragraph, Jewett moves suddenly from what Mrs. Tilley's saying to a description of some cat that shows up. Also, the totally playful word choices and phrases are most reminiscent of childhood, like, for instance, also on page 416, Jewett writes "So Sylvia had to hunt for her until she found her, and call Co'! Co'! with never an answering Moo, until her childish patience was quite spent." Ill.

In class, we spoke about the choice the girl Sylvia makes at the end of the story--how she decides not to tell her new friend, the unnamed older man hunter/ornithologist, about the white crane she saw while she sat on top a pine tree--the same white crane that the man wanted to hunt and kill for his collection, and the same white crane he would have paid her 10$ for finding. It's actually in my opinion that Sylvia most definitely did the right thing--respecting the earth as it is, instead of selling it out for some short-term reward. And in another way, she not only ended up respecting nature, the earth and all that, but also herself--in a way, this was her independence, her own personal choice she made from what she, herself felt was right, in her heart, from her morals, which takes a lot of guts to do to say the least.