“The last sound I expected to hear in so still a region, a laugh … a curios laugh; distinct formal, mirthless. It passed off in a clamorous peal that seemed to wake an echo in every lonely chamber … for the laugh was as tragic, as preternatural a laugh as any I ever heard … circumstance of ghostliness accompanied the curious cachinnation (Bronte 159).”
“When you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard-of contradictions (Gilman 33).”
“The night – its silence – its rest, was rent in twain by a savage, a sharp, a shrill sound that ran from end to end … whatever being uttered that feared shriek could not soon repeat it: not the widest-winged condor on the Andes could, twice in succession, send out such a yell from the cloud shrouding his eyrie … a shout of laughter greeted his entrance; noisy at first, and terminating in [a] goblin’s ha! Ha! She then was there (Bronte 299)”
“For outside you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow. But here I can creep smoothly on the floor, and my shoulder fits in that long smooch around the wall, so I cannot lose the way … Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time (Gilman 260)!”
“In the deep shade, a figure ran backwards and forwards … whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell: it groveled, seemingly on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal (Bronte 418).”
The eerie, hair-prickling sensation inspired by all of these quotes could imply they are from the same novel, however they are from two totally separate stories. Yet both have a creepy, haunting air to them. Unlike a traditional horror story with an excess of blood and gore and incessant killing when a character becomes useless, these stories use insanity and mystery to instill fear within the reader. Although I have read Jane Eyre numerous times, Bertha Mason and her evil laugh never cease to give me the chills. I’ve even had a dream where a Mrs. Rochester-like figure set fire to my room, except no doting Jane Eyre was there to rescue me. The mystery surrounding Bertha’s incontrollable, animalistic madness for most of the story dramatizes Bertha and increases the reader’s fear without actually stating there is something to fear. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman also uses madness to creep the reader out. She follows the narrator’s path to complete insanity in the story. The increasing possibility of the narrator’s going totally insane and her obsession with the only thing in the room, the wallpaper, almost cause the reader to go crazy with the narrator. The focus only on one object in the story and the hidden woman behind the wallpaper and the use of exclamation marks show the narrator’s increased boredom and the emotional excitement that comes with being cooped up with no distractions for a long period of time. (527)
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2 comments:
Inkpot--For me there's little if any doubt that some elements of Gilman's story are borrowed from the same tradition as Jane Eyre. The eerie mood, the madwoman in the attic motif, the nightmare quality of some of the prose--all these link the story with the novel and are drawn from the same Gothic traditions in fiction.
I think it's a very nice catch on your part, and somehow not all that surprising. Everything I'm learning about you so far this year tells me that you are an attentive reader with wide-ranging tastes.
So, two questions, both recommendations if the answer to either is no:
Have you read Jasper Fforde's The Eyre Affair?
Have you read Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea?
Both are spinoffs from Jane Eyre.
No, I have read neither of those books. Thanks for the recommendatioin, I'll have to check them out.
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