Sunday, January 31, 2010

class entry

This week in AP Language Arts we had to read the “Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The ten page assignment was extremely long and hard to understand; I found out the true meaning of the story and liked it. It is about a nervous woman in the eighteenth century that becomes crazy from staying in a room for too long. She starts claming to see a so called woman in the yellow wallpaper. She does not actually see this woman, however instead she is seeing herself. The room that she stays in did not always belong to her because she describes it as a nursery. The bed in the room had gnawing marks on it and the yellow wallpaper had scratches and stains on it. The woman in the story also describes the yellow wallpaper to stain things that touch it. She also states that she is the only person that is able to see the yellow wallpaper and that no one else can see it. It is a very interesting piece of literature written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Also, there was another reading assignment called After the Denim. There are two characters in the story James and Edith. James is Edith’s husband and they are an elderly couple. They go play bingo at the community center every once in a while just to get out of the house and perhaps socialize with other groups. Usually, the people that go play bingo with Edith and James tend to be older couples. However, there is one younger couple dressed up in jeans and wearing fancy earrings. They do not pay for their bingo card and it turns out that the card that the young couple did not pay for ends up being the winning card. James Parker is really mad about this situation and remembers how he used to be like that in his younger days. He then pretends like he is young again at the end of the story, which I really think that he envies the younger couple. The theme of this story in my opinion is you will truly understand what is right from wrong when you become of age and after your denim stage; meaning that you will do the right thing as you get older and older.
The last reading that we had to read was also from the Carver stories and it was called Fat. It is about an extremely large man that refers to himself in the first person plural and I think that adds emphasis to the meaning of the story because people are always judging the fat man by his outside appearance. The characters of this story continue to call the fat man fatty and completely disregard his personality. The only person that gives him a chance is the waiter who is really nice to the fat man. He turns out to be a polite gentleman and treat the waiter with a lot of respect. The meaning of this story is not to judge a book by its cover. What is on the inside is significantly more important than what is on the outside.

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