I'mAnnaRoll

Wide Sargasso by Jean Rhys Sea is similar to another short story we read in previous English classes. In subbie year we read The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (or at least the current juniors did). Wide Sargasso Sea has a lot of similarities, especially Antionette’s confinement in England, with the Yellow Wallpaper. Just to refresh anyone who doesn’t remember the Yellow Wallpaper. It’s told from the point of view of a woman whose recently given birth. However, she feels a detachment from her baby (postpartum depression based on a modern diagnosis). Her husband, John, puts her a room in their colonial mansion with torn yellow wallpaper and scratched floors as a “rest cure”. Her only stimulus is the wallpaper. She starts to envision a figure creeping behind the wall. At the end of the story, she tears off the wallpaper as she tries to free the figure. When her husband comes in, she is crawling on the floor and has “become” the figure in the wallpaper. Ove...

A major theme in Albert Camus’ The Stranger is judgment. Who has the right to judge? It’s clear from the book that juries certainly aren’t able to accurately judge. They misunderstood Meursault’s motive to kill, even laughed at him when he tried to tell them that the sun was responsible for his intensions. It seems like Camus thinks that even the reader is unable to accurately judge Meursault. The first part of the novel we (at least based on class discussions) hated Meursault. Words like “sociopath” and “depressed” were thrown as a way of identifying him. In the first half of the book Meursault is very passive. He doesn’t react at all to animal abuse and is caught up in an act to sexual humiliate a woman. The first part of the book culminates with Meursault shooting a man. However, it’s in the second half of the book where Camus flips us on our head and showing that we have no right to judge Meursault’s actions. Meursault has a deep philosophical euphony and Ca...