Recently for class we read Male Hysteria and analyzed The Return of the Soldier based on it. This was an interesting experience, as I’ve never analyzed two texts in such an interconnected way for a class before. The connections me and my classmates made were really interesting, but I had some issues connecting the two texts completely. I read Male Hysteria first, but since I read The Return of the Soldier second, I missed a lot of the parts of the first text that would have been important to the second. Ideally I could have read Male Hysteria again, but unfortunately I didn’t have the time to. I suppose in the future I could make more extensive notes on the texts I’m reading, so I don’t miss anything.
Month: September 2020
For my first reflection blog post, I’d like to write briefly about a theme I’ve noticed in one of our recent readings in my Madness in Literature class. This will hopefully let me practice writing an analysis of a text before starting on the larger semester project of the annotated digital edition. It seems that we can write this initial post about pretty much anything, so I hope this is an alright topic for it.
The largest text we’ve read so far has been The Yellow Wall-paper by Charlotte Gilman, and one of the themes I’ve found interesting has been the persistence of the narrator’s husband in attempting to get her to doubt her own thoughts and feelings. Several times throughout the story, she states her own thoughts or feelings on her situation (her illness, her “treatment”, the bedroom decor, etc.) only to add in what her husband has told her to the contrary. Even though this is written to be her own personal diary, that nobody know’s she’s even writing, John’s thoughts still take precedent over hers. Because of this, readers can see that John has frequently told her that he knows what’s best for her, despite it clearly hurting her. This ties in pretty well to the common diagnosis of hysteria among women at the time, which was broadly applied to those who presented a wide variety of “unwanted” behaviors in order to strip them of agency, even over their own mind and body. Due to her illness, any of the narrator’s thoughts or feelings are dismissed by John, and she is forced to be bedridden. Both her mind and body are caged.
This theme may appear in other works as we progress through this class, and I’ll probably be using these reflection posts to analyze those texts as well, if we aren’t given any strict outline for them.
