4-20-07
When I first started reading “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, I thought it was going to be about a little girl named Emily and this little happy go lucky story about her liking a boy. I did not expect it to be about a woman who spent all of her life in a house, shutting her self out of the outside world. I kept reading because this short story was assigned for class, I was wondering where it was going. The story recounted strange incidents in her life, but they were not from people who experienced them with her. It was told by the point of view of the people of the town watching and observed by people watching her house being nosy. The narrator’s voice and the way the people of the town watched Miss Emily’s every move, or lack there of, reminded me of the Applewhite family on Desperate Housewives. The mother would not come out of the house but on certain occasions, and she kept her son locked up in the basement. The neighbors complained of noises coming from the house at night, just as the community surrounding Miss Emily’s house complained of the smell. I liked how crazy Miss Emily became through out the story. She got whatever she wanted and intimidated everyone. I think people respected her out of fear and misunderstandings about her. She is made out to be a complex character, but I feel that she is a simple character. She isolates herself when she suffers a loss, she wants what she cannot have so she keeps it where she wants it (by killing him), then she dies. She is a mysterious woman. I knew she was going to kill someone, with the poison. I assumed it was that man who told her he did not want to get married and liked spending time with men. I kind of felt sorry for her when the neighbors revealed the hidden upstairs room with wedding things placed around the room. It was like she did live out what she wanted to, just differently than most people would have. It creeped me out though when there was a grey hair lying in the imprint in the pillow next to the dead decayed groom.

The climax ending is foreshadowed in a couple different parts in this short story. First, when Emily’s father dies and no one knows about it, and she denies he is dead and leaves his body in the house for a few days. You know something is up with her. That is just weird. But the community gives her the benefit of the doubt that she just wants to hold onto her father because he was all that protected her from all the young men coming to court her. Makes you wonder at the end of the story if she killed her father so she could get “married.” There is also the bad smell that lingers around the house for weeks that the neighbors complain about, maybe it was something that died or was killed. The other instance of foreshadowing is when she is in buying poison with the druggist. The druggist asks what kind she wants, her arsenic. This makes it seem like she has used it before and needs to use it again. Then when the druggist asks what she is going to use it for, Emily does not answer and just stares. The druggist quickly goes and packages the poison for Emily. The foreshadowing continues when the guy friend is greeted by the Negro man at the kitchen door one evening and he is never seen again. The neighbors do not think much of the man not coming out, because Miss Emily does not come out. This all leads up to what they find in the boarded up, dusty upstairs, Emily’s dead “groom.” I think William Faulkner is trying to get the message across to the reader that if something seems suspicious; there is probably more going on than you can see. Trust your instincts and do not give a person the benefit of the doubt about fishy instances.

3-14-07
I really loved this short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It reminded me of the “Brady Bunch” when Marsha gets her long blonde braids cut off when she is sleeping by her sister Jan. With a few modifications, like taking out the central part being about the dance and bobbing hair and making it clubbing and shaving hair off, this story could be as current as yesterday. I was surprised that F. Scott Fitzgerald knew so much about the cattiness of young women and how they pretend to care about each other when deep down they cannot stand them. It is the cycle of the movie “Mean Girls.” The main character transforms Lindsay Lohan to be one of them, the plastics (the popular girls). Then all of a sudden when the queen bee’s ex-guy starts falling for Lohan, everything turns. The plastics start sabotaging Lohan and spreading rumors about her. Lohan joins with her old friends and begin to get back at the queen bee plastic. It is what girls do though. In one second girls are best friends, the next they are stabbing each other in the back over a guy. It has happened with one of my roommates this year. The one roommate hooked up with this guy she liked, told my other roommate not to hang out with him or get involved with him why she was studying abroad. Next thing she knows when she comes back from Spain in a month, they are in love and in a Face Book relationship. The sabotage started there; things that I cannot discuss, however very bad. Even though she did not know these things were being done to her my roommate who came back from Spain felt better, similar to Bernice.
Fitzgerald creates Bernice’s identity to change through out his sort story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.” Bernice transforms from beginning to end. Even when she is transformed back to no one being attracted to her, she has still altered personality wise. Socially and I feel that when she returns home from her visit with her cousin, she will continue to be successfully socially active in society. In the beginning of the story, Bernice is socially hopeless, very quiet, and awkward at speaking with young men. Her teeth are a little muddled and she does not dress pleasingly. Bernice begins her transformation when she confronts her cousin at breakfast about her cousin Marjorie and Bernice’s aunt were talking about her. Suddenly, she is standing up for herself, to her cousin. I think Marjorie is a little taken back at first, then continues to criticize in more detail how Bernice is a social failure. Bernice asks for help from Marjorie. And the physical transformation begins. Bernice picks out a dress for her, teaches her how to speak to boys, and gives her ideas of what to speak about. That night at the dance, all the young men notice her and her outgoing personality. Some young men cannot believe it is the same girl and are confused as to why so many young men are cutting in on dances after a couple steps with Bernice. The next big transformation to happen to Bernice was that Warren, Marjorie’s main man was paying a lot of attention to her while she was dancing. He noticed the way she had her hair arranged, her becoming dark red dress, her shadowy eyes. Warren eventually cut in on dancing once he realized how outgoing and social she had become that night. The next week gave Bernice a feeling of being enjoyed in social situations. For the first time she felt that people really took pleasure in being around her, looking at her, listening to her. She gained self-confidence. Soon Marjorie noticed Warren and Bernice getting close and she told her to stay away from him. Marjorie spread rumors that Bernice never planned to follow through with bobbing her hair like she had told everyone previously. Marjorie wanted to make Bernice unattractive so Warren would be interested in her again. Bernice thought she had to prove something to her new friends. She went through with bobbing her hair. It looked horrible. She asked her audience in the barber shop if they liked it, some replied “sure.” This could be looked at as the down fall of her transformation, but I look at it as a continuum of her transformation. Bernice still had all the social skills, just not the beautiful long, wavy hair. She was still the same person, but none of her new “friends” could see that. Bernice wanted revenge on Marjorie for forcing her to follow through with bobbing her hair. While Marjorie was sleeping, Bernice packed her trunk. She went into Marjorie’s room and cut off her long braids. Bernice left and as a symbolic mark, since Warren loved long flowing hair, she threw Marjorie’s braids on his front porch. By the end of the story, Bernice has obviously changed drastically. She stands up for herself and she is not afraid of what people think of her. However, she sort of becomes Marjorie by the end of the story when she cuts off her braids to give her a taste of her own manipulative medicine.

3-7-07
When reading this short story, it reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Tell Tale Heart. Both are told by the same standpoint of a psychotic narrator. I think it is interesting when she talks about how when she was a child she used to work herself into a psychotic terror in the dark. It kind of lets the reader understand how borderline crazy. I used to do this subconsciously when I was younger. I still do this when I am sleeping in a new place from time to time. I hate doing it and it makes me tense and stressed out. I have absolutely no control over it and it is extremely difficult for me to redirect my mind to other more positive thoughts. I enjoyed reading this short story because it seems all nice and fluffy at the beginning, then goes into this neurotic narrator discussing her inner thoughts and feelings as she sees them happening before her. She is kind of having an out of body experience as she views the women figure in the wallpaper struggling to break through the bars.

The narrator in this short story seems to be confined and cut off from the outside world for her own benefit. She lives in her own environment and develops it with her imagination. At first she thinks of the wallpaper as ripped, dirty and discolored. As she starts to write in her journal about the wallpaper, she examines it more closely. She looks into the yellow wallpaper and sees a figure. As she looks deeper, she observes a woman figure behind bars of a cage. The woman is trapped. Just as these observations of the yellow wallpaper transform over time, the narrator’s perception of being in the room is transformed. She relates to the woman in the wallpaper behind the bars. She feels captive in her room. The narrator wants to release the figure by tearing off all the wall paper. When the narrator does this, she is also releasing her feelings by taking off a layer of her “cage” and gaining more freedom. She takes control of her environment. The narrator transforms in this over the course of this short story. As the narrator loses connection with the outside world, she becomes more involved with what is right around her, the yellow wallpaper. As the narrator sinks further into her inner lure to the yellow wallpaper, she becomes increasingly disconnected from day to day life. At first she looks out the window at the garden and the people walking by. She then becomes more inverted and only looks around her room at the yellow wall paper. She hates the wallpaper, but as she spends more time with it she sees that the figure looks like her and it represents her being trapped. The narrator gets crazy not wanting Jennie and John to find out about her obsession with the paper. She feels that they caught onto her. She destroys the paper by peeling it off at night. The next day, she goes in a crazed fit biting and tearing the paper in order to set the trapped woman free. As she is doing this she is spiraling further down into a psychotic state of mind. She become neurotic and feels as though everyone is watching her. This short story exemplifies the downfall of the narrator as the other characters in the story feel as though she is improving in her state of mind.