Let me count the ways...

     I enjoyed reading the poem How do I love thee by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. To me it really encompassed the number of ways love can make you feel, and all the feelings you get about the person you love. When I read the first line of the poem, "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways," I felt like I had heard that phrase before. I can't remember if it was lyrics to a song, or perhaps it was just this poem I might have heard about before, but some reason Love Me Tender by Elvis Presley popped into my mind, and I heard the song as background music in my head as I read the poem. There's no lyrics in the song that match the poem, but the subject matter is very similar and the connection just stands out.

     Browning goes on throughout the poem describing how much her love for this person means to her, comparing it to other loves of hers. She writes, "I love thee to the level of every day's" as if to says she loves this person as much as life itself. She continues, "I love thee with the passion put to use," saying she is in love with this person as much as she is with her passions in life. We've all been there at one extent or another and can relate to how love can make us feel all these things. In the last lines she says, "and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death." It puts in perspective that love can even be greater than life itself.

The Yellow Wallpaper in an insane asylum?

   

     Yesterday in class we discussed Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." We shot out topics for the basis of a good paper on the story, encompassing perception VS reality. Everything we discussed were valid arguments, but what Jared, whom we picked to elaborate on his chosen thesis, actually wanted to write on was how he felt everything the narrator experienced was in her head and suffered from sever schizophrenia. Having never taken any psychology courses before and knowing little about the field, I had to look the word up at thefreedictionary.com, which defined it as "a psychotic disorder (or group of disorders) marked by severely impaired thinking, emotions, and behaviors."
     With this knowledge I look back to when I read the story, and I get the same vibe from it. I don't go as far as Jared did in claiming that the whole story is simply an hallucination, but it's as if what the narrator is experiencing is a reality that has happened in the past and she is re-playing it back in her mind. I think she is now in a mental institution, possibly in a room with yellow wallpaper, and it triggers the memory of of the wallpaper from the house that caused her to lose it. On page 325 in our text, she describes a woman she thinks she sees through the wallpaper and out in the daylight, saying, "I think that woman gets out in the daytime! And I'll tell you why-privately-I've seen her!" I believe the "woman" is actually her, and she gets out in the daytime because she is not allowed to be out at night, due to being confined in a mental institution. I'm not sure if this was Gilman's intent, but she was very against the rest theory medical practice of the day. The narrator was subscribed to this treatment, and what better way to show its flaws than to have her ultimately imprisoned in an insane asylum?