Comments on the "Yellow Wallpaper" or this site

One thing that struck me as interesting about this site is the way that the text of the story appears on the screen when it is put into html format. The appearance is choppy, almost barlike. I suppose that the text itself may be said to be working with the same format. The breaks in the text are nothing more than paragraph breaks. The shape of the original text dictates the appearance on the web. The html language amplifies the textual image, while pointing out and working with its original form

Daniel: The issue of representing the text in a new format is important. I think it relates to the question you asked your students about whether presenting "boxed" images from the film version of the story reinforces the narrator's "entrapment." Both of these examples may relate to the larger question of what happens to "literature" (or film) when it gets re-presented electronically. How does the new format change our reading of works?

The film "Yellow Wallpaper" reminds me of my story "The Feather Pillow," written in Uruguay probably about the same time that Gilman was writing. The change in actress at the end that bothered Laura Grossenbacher seems appropriate to me as a sort of pre-literature of the fantastic guy. I think the new actress is someone different, a concrete manifestation of the "other" (as people like to say nowadays), but which to me was just the unutterable, the unthinkable--whatever parts of people's psyches couldn't fit within the constraints of society. Read "The Feather Pillow," in which the young wife in a seemingly happily married couple has the blood sucked out of her each night by an anthropode with a proboscis that lives in her pillow. My point is, I think that the woman in the film IS a different woman; the narrator's life had become so limiting that major parts of her psyche just got lopped off and collected in this new being that grew and flourished in the world of the wallpaper, getting stronger, STRONGER.... Check out my other stories, too. UT Press published translations.

I think this site is a wonderful Idea, and I hope to see more sites like this very soon. As a sophomore in College I can really use the help and ideas of other people, and sites like this one allow for people to exchange info. Continue to do Excellent Work Eddie Horton Northwestern State University NSHOR6345@alpha.nsula.edu