Feminist Literary Theory, I'm a little confused

I really enjoyed Dr. Kolmerten's unit, if she still taught here I would love to have taken a course with her.

Her essay "My Life in Theory" read like a good novel. I was invested in her as a character and I couldn't wait to see what happened to her next in the essay. She embodies the spirit of feminist criticism not just in her teaching but also in the way she lives her life.  

If there was one thing I have liked a little more it would have been to spend more time of practicing the technical components of how t analyze a text as a literary feminist critic. Maybe it was just me having a hard time understanding The Yellow Wallpaper because it my first go around with it, and because of that I missed the process of how I was supposed to look at it. But I at the end of this unit I feel like I would have a hard time analyzing a text using feminist criticism. Maybe someone who got it better could help me understand? 

Girls and baseball

This was, no joke, the StoryCorps post this week. I heard it on Morning Edition today:

"A Little League of her Own: the First Girl in Baseball"
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/30/597960442/a-little-league-of-her-own-the-first-girl-in-little-league-baseball

Does it Have To be Just One Way or Another? Why Not Both?

In the article "Monumental Feminism and Literature's Ancestral House: Another Look at 'The Yellow Wallpaper,'" I found the idea of "binary oppositions" to be very intriguing (Haney - Peritz). The workings of opposing forces within "The Yellow Wallpaper," such as "sick and well, the real and the fanciful, order and anarchy, self and other, and make and female," can be seen as strict guidelines or ideas that have no overlap. It is interpreted from this article that if you do not represent one, you must be the other. For example, the main character in "The Yellow Wallpaper" was seen as not doing well or experiencing unusual behaviors, which is how she described herself from her own view in her writings, as well as from her husband's perspective. Instead of defining her as maybe having anxiety or going through a difficult time in life (background information would lead to a more accurate explanation), she is seen as sick. There is really no in between.      

                                           Day or Night?

This is a picture I took yesterday of part of Hodson and Whitaker. The time of day is not clearly identified as day or night, since the sun is setting; therefore, it would be considered dusk. In addition, the weather we are currently experiencing can be seen as neither winter nor spring, but as kind of a transitional period between them. In comparison to the binary oppositions idea for the yellow wallpaper, the world is not quite as clear cut. 

In relation to this idea, I found this quote that I thought pairs really well. I took this picture from the poster displayed on the second floor of Whitaker, right outside of Student life. I believe it was created in part by the Feminist Student Union. Sorry it is kind of blurry, but the quote reads:

"It is time that we see all gender as a spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideals. We should stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by who we are" (Emma Watson).

I thought the idea of a "spectrum" was interesting. Not every person is considered to be boxed in to a stereotypical identity, but that there's fluidity between these stereotypes for how we define ourselves.

Lastly, I just wanted to bring up this news article I just came across this week that is quite fitting to this topic. The article is "In Sweden's Preschools, Boys Learn to Dance and Girls Learn to Yell." Thier main goal is to make government funded preschools in Sweden gender neutral. Since "1998, Sweden added new language to its national curriculum requiring that all preschools 'counteract traditional gender roles and gender patterns.'" I just thought this non-traditional technique implemented in schools was interesting to learn about. I also wonder that if teachers are still telling students how to behave, even if the typical roles are reversed, doesn't that still impede on the student's ability to find thier own identity? What if girls in this preschool want to be more outspoken, which is what they are taught, but they still want to learn how to dance? Wouldn't an integration of various behaviors and activities for all students be more beneficial for the creation of thier own identity?
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/24/world/europe/sweden-gender-neutral-preschools.html 

The Yellow Wallpaper? More like... The Tragic... Tragedy...

There is a 1977 short film, a 1989 PBS Masterpiece Theater television program, a sort of low-budget 2012 thriller/horror movie, and a slightly higher budget 2016 horror/drama all based off of The Yellow Wallpaper. 

My question this week is brief—or less long winded than usual. (edit: actually, not really)

Why all the horror?

Yes, I read the short story for class in my bed in the middle of the night and was properly unnerved: shadow women in walls, your closest family refusing to believe you, everybody creeping and then creeping some more... freaky enough, especially in the dark.

But if this is piece is such a cornerstone of feminist literary, as Kolodney and the others alluded in their essays, why do adaptations tend to favor everything BUT the feminism?

I guess the lens is still applicable in the movies—John is probably made to be a jerk. But the trailers (of course I watched the trailers) don't seem to offer much else other than John worrying over his wife as she goes utterly, frighteningly insane.

Or are we as a society not ready, or unwilling to make feminism overt?

I'm too tired at 12:20am ish to figure out a proper meme that relates to the subject. Here's a funny Star Wars meme anyway.

The brief Drake and Josh/Prequel meme crossovers were great, I highly recommend you guys peruse some

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrequelMemes/comments/649rwg/hence_forth_you_shall_be_known_as_darthjosh/

There Must Be Compromise

On Wednesday, I was talking to Natalie and Luke before class about Feminist Theory. I don't remember if it was me or Natalie who said this (probably Natalie), but it was brought up that hearing Dr. Kolmerten's journey to becoming a feminist theorist brought in feelings of frustration and anger at just hearing what some people have to go through. Luke then said that you have to be careful not to look at this theory or feminism in general as revenge, which I think is a very good point. It would be very easy for one to become a feminist in search of revenge against the "enemy" with a "us against them" mentality. Often times, not even just in the context of feminism, this is the easiest and most natural mentality to fall into.

It's crucial to remember that feminism outside of the context of literature is not an us against them situation, and there are many more layers to it. This is comparable to the part in Dr. Kolmerten's story where she and other theorists butted heads about whether gender or language was more important when analyzing literature, when in the end it was a definite combination of both. There must be compromise in order for there to be agreement and unity, and this applies to both life and literature.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/jennaguillaume/feminist-killjoy

Around and Around and Around We Go in the Attic

      Rereading both Jane Eyre and The Yellow Wallpaper recently have helped to me to ponder deeply on women in literature, and how they are written in stories. I can agree with Gilbert and Gubar's idea that, especially during the nineteenth century and before, female authors typically wrote a type of  "paraphernalia of confinement, like the gate at the head of the stairs, instruments that definitively indicate[d] her imprisonment" (120). Both of these works of literature include symbols and stories of women locked away, driven to madness for reasons half obscured, half obvious. The author made their story intertwine with tragedy and isolation, making a gloomy house or attic a physical symbol of their confinement and restlessness, feelings that cannot be spoken aloud.
      Feminist theory raises good questions about how women are approached in literature - and about who writes them and for what purpose. What's interesting is how feminist theory seemed to solidify for me how much all the theories we've looked at in class can blend together in order to create an interesting approach to a text. How we choose to approach a text is up to us, and so is the question of whether any theory holds the most merit (or, at least, depending on the text we’re using the theory on).

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/d1/77/9c/d1779cea28c9feab07f3f78cc9f250a9--bronte-sisters-charlotte-bronte.jpg

Falling into Madness

So before this week I had never read Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, the closest story I had read to it was The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin. 
The part that really stood out to me in The Yellow Wallpaper was where she started writing about the smell.
"It creeps all over the house. I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall, lying in wait for me on the stairs... Even when I go to ride, if I turn my head suddenly and surprise it -- there is that smell! Such a peculiar odor, too! I have spent hours in trying to analyze it, to find what it smelled like. It is not bad -- at first, and very gentle, but quite the subtlest, most enduring odor I ever met." 

The first thing I thought was that something had died because the way she described the smell reminded me of when there was a dead bird in my room for about a week. At first the smell was barely there, but as the week went on the smell got progressively worse. But for the main character instead of finding the smell progressively worse she starts to like it.

Does this count as a picture?

RFirst of all, I really want to thank Dr. Kolmerten for telling us her story and teaching us about the wonderful, and blissfully clear feminist theory. I loved every minute of it and am sorry you couldn’t be with us today. 

But on to the real task at hand. I decided I would (finally) use a picture, I figured I ought to do a quote for my writing. My quote is from The Madwoman in the Attic, and expands on the broader reach of feminist theory, and the purpose of female literature. “Recording their own distinctly female experience, they are secretly working through and within the conventions of literary texts to define their own lives.” I found this quote intriguing because I thought that was what all writers do, but it got me thinking about the reasons a person writes. 

So I maybe failed at not using a quote... I originally had a gif I wanted to use but I’m not that technologically gifted. I tried. Maybe next time.

An Illustration of Two "Spheres"

While reading The Madwoman in the Attic I began to think about the relationship of the woman as an object in relationship of Renaissance paintings. Specifically, when the author quotes that the woman must consider the inevitability of “uncomfortable spatial options of expulsion into the cold outside or suffocation in the hot indoors” I began to think of how women were first famously illustrated in these High Renaissance paintings. In Fra Angelico’s “The Annunciation” we see a perfect example of Mary being kept inside, while the dangers of the outside are subtly highlighted to show the dangers of the wild to not only people within the world of the painting but Mary herself. The imagery of enclosure works well for the scene illustrated, Gabriel flying inside of the small claustrophobic area Mary is painted into, while the outside leaves an ominous note of how people interpreted the dangerous world of the outside. Specifically, the use of the cypress tree as an image of death is used as a suggestion of these dangers. Mary, who is very much “stuck” inside of the sphere of the home in painting is also doomed if she leaves the safety of the inside for the outside world. The painting almost suggests that Mary is stuck in between her decision of two places, motherhood, or the wild.

Fra Angelico's "The Annunciation" showing the inside and outside for a female figure

Source: (https://www.artbible.info/art/large/255.html)

A Mind and a Voice

One quote that stuck out to me was when Kolodny writes that, "if we are to survive, to challenge the (accepted and generally male) authority who has traditionally wielded the power to determine what may be written and how it shall be read." (175) One reason this quote stuck in my mind is because it used to be considered bad for a woman to read or write or think for herself, and this states what many have accepted and worked towards, which is making sure women have a voice that is heard.


Source: https://giphy.com/gifs/disney-books-beauty-and-the-beast-belle-JEhCPFfqi2Hy8

I know this is super late but here it goes.

I found Marxism to be very one- dimensional because of the fact that everything was concerned with social structure and what is tangible. (Or maybe that was just materialism, I'm not completely sure.) But there was one thing that confused me. Marx started out a very wealthy man but as he pursued his ideals he ended up in extreme poverty. So would thst restrict his own credibility based on his social level if marxists claim that intelligence is based on social class? Maybe I missed something but I honestly do not know.