Tuesday, January 31, 2012
A working woman
I thought it was very interesting that the main character in The Country of
Pointed Firs was a writer. In The Yellow Wallpaper as well as The Awakening, the main characters were discouraged from pursuing their endeavors in writing and art. However, in The Country of
Pointed Firs, no one finds it odd that a single woman is working as a writer. As we discussed in class, it was thought that the mind and body needed to be balanced. However, the narrator in The Country of
Pointed Firs does not appear to have any children, which is the woman's way of exercising her body, and chooses to solely concentrate on exercising her mind. This is a stark contrast from the previous two pieces of literature in which this is what the women wanted to do, but were discouraged from doing.
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I like the way you connected Mrs. Todd to the characters in our previously assigned books. I agree that she embodies several characteristics of “new woman” that Edna from The Awakening and the woman from The Yellow Wallpaper were seeking to obtain. One characteristic I noticed that did not seem to apply to the description of the new woman in The Gibson Girl is Mrs. Todd’s weight. She was described as being very heavy which contrasts with the slender body of a new woman that we discussed in a previous class discussion.
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