Wilderness Tips | Literary Precedents

Wilderness Tips Literary Precedents

In "Death by Landscape" Atwood develops a striking variation on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," in which the protagonist's nervous breakdown following the birth of her child prompts her increasing obsession with the ornate pattern of the wallpaper in the bedroom that has become a kind of cell in the prison of her bourgeois domesticity. The assiduous keeper of a journal she keeps secret from her husband, the woman eventually imagines herself into the wallpaper, both entrapped by its designs and hiding behind them; like her projected alter ego, she creeps around the baseboards and literally throws her self-assured and controlling physician husband into a dead faint at the sight of her. Atwood's story revises Gilman's macabre rendition of the desperate measures to which conventional expectations can drive women; her protagonist Lois regards the various paintings which adorn her walls, as the true refuge of her...
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