This blog post is based on two different stories, John Updike’s “A&P”, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”. This is also my Final Paper for Sunny Hawkins’ English 2362 class.
First off, WOW, I can’t believe I am already writing my final paper for this class, it seems like just yesterday that I was starting my first semester of college! Time really has flown by!
Whenever I started thinking about what I wanted to write about for this paper, I really wanted to try to write about stories that I was familiar with and understood very well. The first thing I did was look through my reading journal at past entries. Then I looked at my past blog posts. After doing this, I knew that I had to write about John Updike’s “A&P”, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”. I wanted to write about these stories not only because I understood them very well, but also because these were my two favorite stories that we read throughout the year.
I’m going to start off by focusing on John Updike’s “A&P”.
You all are probably wondering why I chose to start my final paper by writing about the shortest and simplest story we have read so far, but I have an explanation. I feel like I chose this story because this was the one I could relate to the most, and this was the one that stuck to my mind the best, which is weird because it was the FIRST story we read all year!
I feel like why this story stuck to me is because I can relate a lot to Sammy. I mean, he's 19, I'm almost 19. He's constantly trying to impress girls, as is every single 18 year old boy in the world.
I found this story very interesting because the setting is New England in the 1950s-60s. Obviously, things have changed A LOT since then, well except for 19 year old boys' interests in girls. These days, no one would bat an eye if a group of girls were to walk into a grocery store wearing bathing suits, well, unless they were good looking, but back then, it was completely unheard of, or was it? As said in the story, "our town is five miles from a beach...” (Updike 463) the town is only five miles from the beach, but seeing girls in bathing suits walk into a grocery store is unheard of. The story also says, "As I say, we're right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three real-estate offices and about twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again." (Updike 464). So even though the town is five miles from the beach, you could not tell that if you were in town. The story also says there are people living there who haven't seen the beach in twenty years. What I'm trying to accomplish here is find reasons that it was so frowned upon to walk into a store wearing bathing suits, other than the reason that it was the 1950s-60s. After I read this story I tried to figure out if the time period was the reason, or was it just the people living in the town? We all know that the 50s/60s were conservative, but I'm willing to bet that there was a town out there that didn't think it was frowned upon to wear a bathing suit into a grocery store. I'm trying to prove this point because all I remember from the in-class discussion was people saying that the time period was the reason that the girls got kicked out of the store, while no one mentioned that it could have been that the town and its people were conservative.
Another interesting aspect of this story is when Sammy quit. Was he trying to impress the girls, or was he just looking for a way out? I personally think it was a little bit of both. I think he obviously wanted to impress the girls, especially Queenie, but I also think he realized that working at the A&P store was not going to do anything for him in the future. For all we know, this could have been last straw for Sammy. Lengel, the manager, could have been driving him nuts for months now and Sammy finally called it quits after this disagreement. Now, the obvious reason for him quitting his job is that he wanted to impress the girls and take on the role as their "hero", but I really have no idea what he was even thinking when he made that decision. What girl is going to be impressed by a guy deciding to quit his job at a grocery store of all places? MAYBE they would of been impressed if he quit his job at The Trump Organization, but he would have just been an idiot if he did that.
One final aspect of this story was how the author allowed the reader to come up with their own ending to the story. There were a couple ways this story could have ended. The first ending would have been where Sammy quit his job, walked out of the store, where Queenie and the girls were waiting for him, and they all drove off into the distance and lived happily ever after. The second scenario would have been where Sammy walked out of the store just to see that the girls had already left, and Sammy would have come to the realization that he still can’t impress girls, and now he is unemployed. I like to think that the first scenario is how it went down, just because I want to see Sammy get lucky, but in all likelihood it would have ended like the second scenario went, because what girl would be impressed by a guy quitting his job at a grocery store?!
I really liked this story because it was a story I could relate to, and it had some very interesting aspects in it. It seemed like the author wanted it be a story where each reader could pick their own ending and decide what each character was thinking. I bet you could tell fifty students to read this story, and there would be fifty different responses to the story. That's just how interesting it is. It's all about how you read it and how your mind comprehends it, and my mind just decided to take the out of the box route and question the obvious in this particular story!
These next couple of paragraphs are inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”.
Wow! The first time I read this story, I was SO CONFUSED. I really couldn’t grasp what was going on throughout the story. Once we had the class discussion about this story, I had a much better understanding of it, and now that I’ve read it again for my final paper, I understand it very well.
I can't relate to this story as much as I could to John Updike's "A&P", but I can relate to it in that I've been around depressed people before, and I get what they are going through.
I feel like this story is interesting for a number of reasons. Those reasons being the time period it is set in, the mysteriousness of it, and how you can really think what you want to about how it ends. I think it is very interesting that the story is set in the late 1800s. I think it shows that people still went through things back then that a lot of people go through today: depression. When John ordered the narrator to rest as much as possible and stay in one room in order to help with her depression, I almost laughed out loud. I thought it was so ironic that he was telling her to sit and do nothing all day to help with her depression, rather than get out of the house and get her mind off of things! I think this showed that John really did have his wife wrapped around his finger and he had complete control over her.
Being around depressed people before, I know that one way for them to get better is to get their mind off of things and think about something else, which is what the narrator did with the yellow wallpaper. But the problem with that was that the yellow wallpaper was the ONLY THING she could focus on while she was locked in her room! That yellow wallpaper started off as being a good thing for her depression, but by the end of the story, it made her go absolutely batpoop (I would say the actual term but I don't know if I should...) crazy!
The way Gilman words this story adds a whole aspect to it. Whenever she used the word "creeping" (Gilman 159) , I almost got goosebumps. Creeps has to be one of the creepiest words in the dictionary. See what I did there? I like it when an author uses particular words in the story to add an aspect and really have an effect on the reader. If Gilman were to use the term “tiptoe”, I would have felt completely different, and definitely not as creeped out. Whenever I hear the word tiptoe, I think “Twas the Night before Christmas”, not creepy and mysterious short story.
I think the wallpaper represents her situation in trying to get away from her husband. If you remember, at the end of the story it says that the pattern of the wallpaper clearly resembles a woman trying to get out. To me, this clearly represents the narrator trying to get out of the house, or more particularly, the room that her husband has her locked in. Now of course, the wallpaper does not actually show this, it’s just some old yellow wallpaper, but the narrator sees a completely different pattern because she is going completely insane in that room. She starts ripping the wallpaper because she is trying to escape the room that she is locked in, and perhaps she is trying to escape her own mind? Woah that’s deep.
Now let’s get to the good stuff, the end, where no one really knew what happened. Did her husband regain consciousness? Did she break out of the room and run outside and run around for a couple of hours? Did she kill her husband? I DON’T KNOW. What I like to think happened was she jumped over her unconscious husband, ran outside and rolled in the grass for a good while (just to remember what the outdoors felt like), and then went back inside, killed her husband, and then went back outside and lived happily ever after, leaving the house and her husband behind. That’s what I really liked about this story, and reader could each come up with their own ending and have a different understanding of the story.
There are many similarities between these two stories, one being the unique time era of each, and another being how I could really decide what happened after each story ended. I wanted to base this post on the latter of those two reasons. These two stories were special because each individual reader could make up their own ending, and it wouldn’t take away from the context of the story. This was a major theme of this class for me. I felt like in this class I could really use my imagination and think about how I thought a story went, instead of having a teacher tell me how it went. One of my goals in this class was to be able to understand each story I read more fully, and I definitely think I accomplished that goal. Dr. Sunny, I can’t thank you enough for introducing me to a whole new way of reading!
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Seagull Reader: Stories. New York: W&W
Norton, 2015. 150-167.
Updike, John. "A&P." The Seagull Reader: Stories. New York: W&W Norton , 2015. 460-467.
First off, WOW, I can’t believe I am already writing my final paper for this class, it seems like just yesterday that I was starting my first semester of college! Time really has flown by!
Whenever I started thinking about what I wanted to write about for this paper, I really wanted to try to write about stories that I was familiar with and understood very well. The first thing I did was look through my reading journal at past entries. Then I looked at my past blog posts. After doing this, I knew that I had to write about John Updike’s “A&P”, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”. I wanted to write about these stories not only because I understood them very well, but also because these were my two favorite stories that we read throughout the year.
I’m going to start off by focusing on John Updike’s “A&P”.
You all are probably wondering why I chose to start my final paper by writing about the shortest and simplest story we have read so far, but I have an explanation. I feel like I chose this story because this was the one I could relate to the most, and this was the one that stuck to my mind the best, which is weird because it was the FIRST story we read all year!
I feel like why this story stuck to me is because I can relate a lot to Sammy. I mean, he's 19, I'm almost 19. He's constantly trying to impress girls, as is every single 18 year old boy in the world.
I found this story very interesting because the setting is New England in the 1950s-60s. Obviously, things have changed A LOT since then, well except for 19 year old boys' interests in girls. These days, no one would bat an eye if a group of girls were to walk into a grocery store wearing bathing suits, well, unless they were good looking, but back then, it was completely unheard of, or was it? As said in the story, "our town is five miles from a beach...” (Updike 463) the town is only five miles from the beach, but seeing girls in bathing suits walk into a grocery store is unheard of. The story also says, "As I say, we're right in the middle of town, and if you stand at our front doors you can see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three real-estate offices and about twenty-seven old free-loaders tearing up Central Street because the sewer broke again." (Updike 464). So even though the town is five miles from the beach, you could not tell that if you were in town. The story also says there are people living there who haven't seen the beach in twenty years. What I'm trying to accomplish here is find reasons that it was so frowned upon to walk into a store wearing bathing suits, other than the reason that it was the 1950s-60s. After I read this story I tried to figure out if the time period was the reason, or was it just the people living in the town? We all know that the 50s/60s were conservative, but I'm willing to bet that there was a town out there that didn't think it was frowned upon to wear a bathing suit into a grocery store. I'm trying to prove this point because all I remember from the in-class discussion was people saying that the time period was the reason that the girls got kicked out of the store, while no one mentioned that it could have been that the town and its people were conservative.
Another interesting aspect of this story is when Sammy quit. Was he trying to impress the girls, or was he just looking for a way out? I personally think it was a little bit of both. I think he obviously wanted to impress the girls, especially Queenie, but I also think he realized that working at the A&P store was not going to do anything for him in the future. For all we know, this could have been last straw for Sammy. Lengel, the manager, could have been driving him nuts for months now and Sammy finally called it quits after this disagreement. Now, the obvious reason for him quitting his job is that he wanted to impress the girls and take on the role as their "hero", but I really have no idea what he was even thinking when he made that decision. What girl is going to be impressed by a guy deciding to quit his job at a grocery store of all places? MAYBE they would of been impressed if he quit his job at The Trump Organization, but he would have just been an idiot if he did that.
One final aspect of this story was how the author allowed the reader to come up with their own ending to the story. There were a couple ways this story could have ended. The first ending would have been where Sammy quit his job, walked out of the store, where Queenie and the girls were waiting for him, and they all drove off into the distance and lived happily ever after. The second scenario would have been where Sammy walked out of the store just to see that the girls had already left, and Sammy would have come to the realization that he still can’t impress girls, and now he is unemployed. I like to think that the first scenario is how it went down, just because I want to see Sammy get lucky, but in all likelihood it would have ended like the second scenario went, because what girl would be impressed by a guy quitting his job at a grocery store?!
I really liked this story because it was a story I could relate to, and it had some very interesting aspects in it. It seemed like the author wanted it be a story where each reader could pick their own ending and decide what each character was thinking. I bet you could tell fifty students to read this story, and there would be fifty different responses to the story. That's just how interesting it is. It's all about how you read it and how your mind comprehends it, and my mind just decided to take the out of the box route and question the obvious in this particular story!
These next couple of paragraphs are inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”.
Wow! The first time I read this story, I was SO CONFUSED. I really couldn’t grasp what was going on throughout the story. Once we had the class discussion about this story, I had a much better understanding of it, and now that I’ve read it again for my final paper, I understand it very well.
I can't relate to this story as much as I could to John Updike's "A&P", but I can relate to it in that I've been around depressed people before, and I get what they are going through.
I feel like this story is interesting for a number of reasons. Those reasons being the time period it is set in, the mysteriousness of it, and how you can really think what you want to about how it ends. I think it is very interesting that the story is set in the late 1800s. I think it shows that people still went through things back then that a lot of people go through today: depression. When John ordered the narrator to rest as much as possible and stay in one room in order to help with her depression, I almost laughed out loud. I thought it was so ironic that he was telling her to sit and do nothing all day to help with her depression, rather than get out of the house and get her mind off of things! I think this showed that John really did have his wife wrapped around his finger and he had complete control over her.
Being around depressed people before, I know that one way for them to get better is to get their mind off of things and think about something else, which is what the narrator did with the yellow wallpaper. But the problem with that was that the yellow wallpaper was the ONLY THING she could focus on while she was locked in her room! That yellow wallpaper started off as being a good thing for her depression, but by the end of the story, it made her go absolutely batpoop (I would say the actual term but I don't know if I should...) crazy!
The way Gilman words this story adds a whole aspect to it. Whenever she used the word "creeping" (Gilman 159) , I almost got goosebumps. Creeps has to be one of the creepiest words in the dictionary. See what I did there? I like it when an author uses particular words in the story to add an aspect and really have an effect on the reader. If Gilman were to use the term “tiptoe”, I would have felt completely different, and definitely not as creeped out. Whenever I hear the word tiptoe, I think “Twas the Night before Christmas”, not creepy and mysterious short story.
I think the wallpaper represents her situation in trying to get away from her husband. If you remember, at the end of the story it says that the pattern of the wallpaper clearly resembles a woman trying to get out. To me, this clearly represents the narrator trying to get out of the house, or more particularly, the room that her husband has her locked in. Now of course, the wallpaper does not actually show this, it’s just some old yellow wallpaper, but the narrator sees a completely different pattern because she is going completely insane in that room. She starts ripping the wallpaper because she is trying to escape the room that she is locked in, and perhaps she is trying to escape her own mind? Woah that’s deep.
Now let’s get to the good stuff, the end, where no one really knew what happened. Did her husband regain consciousness? Did she break out of the room and run outside and run around for a couple of hours? Did she kill her husband? I DON’T KNOW. What I like to think happened was she jumped over her unconscious husband, ran outside and rolled in the grass for a good while (just to remember what the outdoors felt like), and then went back inside, killed her husband, and then went back outside and lived happily ever after, leaving the house and her husband behind. That’s what I really liked about this story, and reader could each come up with their own ending and have a different understanding of the story.
There are many similarities between these two stories, one being the unique time era of each, and another being how I could really decide what happened after each story ended. I wanted to base this post on the latter of those two reasons. These two stories were special because each individual reader could make up their own ending, and it wouldn’t take away from the context of the story. This was a major theme of this class for me. I felt like in this class I could really use my imagination and think about how I thought a story went, instead of having a teacher tell me how it went. One of my goals in this class was to be able to understand each story I read more fully, and I definitely think I accomplished that goal. Dr. Sunny, I can’t thank you enough for introducing me to a whole new way of reading!
Works Cited
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Seagull Reader: Stories. New York: W&W
Norton, 2015. 150-167.
Updike, John. "A&P." The Seagull Reader: Stories. New York: W&W Norton , 2015. 460-467.