Sunday, February 12, 2012
A Conformist?- Lady Tal
One thing that I noticed in the book was that Lady Tal stated, twice, that she does her best to conform. However, I got almost the exact opposite impression from her. It seemed to me that Lady Tal did anything but conform. Not only did her looks make her stand out, but her personality did as well. People always seemed as though they had something to say about her and what she was doing. One specific way in which I thought that Lady Tal did not conform to society's norms was her aspiration to be a novelist. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator was highly discouraged from writing. While no one outwardly opposed to Lady Tal's work, I was quite surprised that she chose writing as her line of work for the time. I feel as though Lady Tal embodied a more acceptable New Woman for that time. She had been married, even though it did not seem that she had wanted to be, and was given the excuse never to have to marry again. Her chosen profession also lent a hand in establishing this acceptable New Woman, in which she pushed the envelope of the time, but not so much as though to make people too uncomfortable.
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I agree about Lady Tal not really being a conformist even though she said she was. Maybe it was that she wished she was? She was critiqued as being strange and not truly caring about her brother when he died, although that wasn't case, because she coped with it in an unusual way from how grieving was supposed to be done in this time. Rather than laying in bed for days she carried on with her life, which was something not viewed as conforming to what people did when deaths occurred.
ReplyDeleteI was back and forth on whether Lady Tal was a conformist or not. For the most part I agree that she isn't a conformist and often times contradicted society's norms. However, there was one quote which made me to believe she did conform, even though she may not have been aware of it. "Lady Tal had read other people's books, and had herself written a book which was extremely like theirs. It was a case of unconscious, complete imitation. The explanation of Lady Tal's having produced a novel so very different from herself, was simply that, as a matter of fact, she had no produced that novel at all" (215).
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