Deeper Reading

After reading these two stories, I realized that I needed to change my way of reading to focus more on points that seemed to stick out or hints that were clues to what it was already foreshadowing.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, it did surprise me that the narrator was telling her story from beyond the grave. I had a feeling that she did like the idea of death, ghost and hauntings but it never occurred to me that she herself could be dead. After re-reading the first part of the story, the whole piece comes together to make more sense of her experiences while in the room and sightings. One part in particular that would give away to the reader that she is dead is when she says, "John is a physician, and perhaps-- (I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)-- perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster"(505). She is mentioning the living soul, which she would not say to and dead paper. If I had been reading closer I feel that I might have been able to pick up on this detail.

In Desiree's Baby, I loved the end and was obsessed with how it turned out for Desiree and Armand. I feel that, again, if I had been reading closer to the text, I would have noticed that Armand was the one with black blood in his genes. On the first page, we can tell the difference between the way Armand's father treated the slaves and the way that Armand is more strict on them because of their color. Also, I noticed that when describing the house that Armand lived in, it had a, "roof came down steep and black like a cowl, reaching out beyond the wide galleries that encircled the yellow stuccoed house. Big, solemn oaks grew close to it, and their thick-leaved far-reaching branches shadowed it like a pall"(517). The house is described as being overgrown, thick, dark compared to La Blanche's cabin, meaning white. There are other comparisons of Armand being dark to Desiree always being dressed in white and having pale skin.

For both of these stories, one could pick up on the hints but it takes practice of a deeper reading to truly understand the message the first time through.