.004 [life, interrupted]

Yesterday was, quite possibly, the most stressful day that I have endured here on campus...So many papers were due, fifty sketches were to be turned in, and I also had to discuss a novel which I have discussed in great length all throughout high-school; a novel which deals with issues I would much prefer not to discuss. I was also tired [roommate issues] and annoyed at the post office for changing its hours to ones that are impossible for me to fit into my schedule.

One might think that a viewing of one of my favorite films might help to take the edge off, but it did not. Yes, I was able to take notes on the correlations between Girl, Interrupted andThe Yellow Wallpaper, but I was more distracted by my own life, so the whole film was frustrating to sit through. All personal drama aside, I found that Susanna Kayson's character is similar to the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper in a couple of ways. First, both women are writers. Second, both women are "trapped" in spaces which do not allow them the sort of freedom they need to thrive. This directly revolts against Virginia Woolf's idea that a woman must have a room of her own and money in order to write well; instead, it reinforces the idea of "a room of one's own" as a metaphor for power and freedom. Both Kayson and the narrator were locked in spaces against their wills, and both struggled to maintain a sense of self in each situation. In the case of Susanna Kayson, the writer began to become attached to her illness and her entrapment, causing her to lose some of her zeal for life and passion for writing. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper, likewise, begins to lose her firm hold on sanity as she is locked up in a space of her own in order to "cure" her.

As a side note, i thought it was an interesting choice to show the movie Girl, Interrupted in accompaniment with the novel instead of the movie that was created directly from the text. [Girl, Interrupted is actually a memoir written by Susanna Kayson]

This is an important element to me because it relates Charlotte Perkins Gilman's message to another, similar story. Since Susanna Kayson's story is much more modern than Gilman's, it also brings more relevance to the novel, and the reader/viewer is able to further understand how, in many cases, being forced to "rest" in seclusion, often times results in the loss of sanity.

Again, both made me realize that it is not physical space that really matters, but the attitudes about the space and the freedoms allowed there that truly make the space what it is.