Structuralism and the Yellow Wallpaper
Structuralism and Stetson's "The Yellow Wallpaper"
In Charlotte Perkins Stetson's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper," a chilling and darker side of the Victorian woman is exposed. In the story, a young Victorian housewife is believed to be sick by her husband and subsequently locked up in a room, where she slowly begins to loose her grip on reality. In essence, the story demonstrates the extreme power men at the time had over a much more helpless female role, primarily because the structure of society took away all power the women had over their own bodies, lifestyles, and being. In the story, the term insanity and all the meaning behind it becomes a charged method for a patriarchal society to take away power from women; as the author begins to embrace her perceived insanity she begins to solidify her role within this complex and oppressive gender hierarchy, being completely powerless to fight it.
The language of a story goes much further than just to entertain. It represents a whole slew of deeper embedded meanings and charged social representations. After all, "language is a social institution" (De Saussure 59). Thus, the description and labeling of the narrator as insane is a social application of language to serve certain gender and power roles from within the larger Victorian society. In this, there is clearly a "relationship between the historical facts and the language-state" (De Saussure 64). From a structuralism perspective, the important parts of a story are the embedded meanings of the systems that created...
According to Phillip Rosen in Narrative Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, "The syntagmatic is comprised of the rule-governed relationships among signs present in an actual, concrete signifying "chain" such as a sentence; it is the realm of combination. The paradigmatic is constituted by the relationships among all the possible…alternatives to each element of a signifying chain; it is the realm of substitution." In film, this sort of opposition
Chokshi, Carter, Gupta, and Allen (1995) report that during the critical states of emergency, ongoing intermittently until 1989, a low-level police official could detain any individual without a hearing by for up to six months. "Thousands of individuals died in custody, frequently after gruesome acts of torture" Those who were tried were sentenced to death, banished, or imprisoned for life" (Chokshi, Carter, Gupta, & Allen, ¶ 6). The enactment
In an article titled The Superego, Narcissism and Great Expectations Ingham writes "As [Pip] forlornly gazes at his parent's headstone he is suddenly accosted by an escaped convict, Magwitch, who threatens dreadful consequences unless Pip steals a file and food. Magwitch seems to emerge from the parental grave and to embody primitive menace, dire and horrifying punishments -- the 'ghost' of the lost parents, infused with the abandoned child's
Prater Violet was above all else a book meant to elaborate on the creative process as it pertains to film. And although Prater Violet as not intended an avenue for analysis of literary theories, the characters display behaviors and personalities that fall into several theories contemplated in Terry Eagleton' s: Literary Theory:An Introduction. New Criticism, as Eagleton explains, points to the non-essential qualities of novels in their lack of need
Prater Violet and Eagleton's Literary Theory Often, when writing a literary work, authors are focused so much on their personal views and intentions with the story that no literary theory comes to mind. Furthermore, writers are seldom concerned with adhering to or promoting any specific theory. Nevertheless, it is the nature of readers and critics to want to impose theories upon literary works. Much like life, literary works present themselves in
Thus, it is clear that the novel in itself represents a series of underlying reasons and concepts which aim at personalizing the apparently common life of Bloom. Another important theme of the novel is the idea of the presence of the conscience. In this sense, unlike many previous pieces of literature, "Ulysses" develops a human conscience for its characters. In this sense, Stephan and Bloom both have conscience problems which
Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.
Get Started Now