Maxine Clair Cherry Bomb Analysis

Insanity is a deranged state of the mind. Not everyone has the same experiences nor the same symptoms which lead to their mental disorder. In her story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman presents a peculiar case of insanity. The main character is put on bed rest to overcome her temporary nervous depression. However, while being stuck inside the room, the unreliable narrator increasingly becomes more and more symptomatic. Gilman shows the progression of the main character’s insanity through the woman in the wallpaper, John, and the bed.

In Maxine Maxine’s narrative, “Cherry Bomb”, it openly shows how she uses literary techniques of symbolism, imagery, and allusion to characterize her childhood innocence being destroyed. Maxine uses these literary terms to characterize her childhood memories being destroyed by an incident in the summer. In the narrative, she talks about how it affected her and her perception. She mentions people and objects in her story. Every detail she described was an important factor in her life.

Gilman also highlights a lack of identity of the narrator through the setting of the novella which reflects the narrator’s societal confinement. The protagonist is surrounded by “hedges and walls and gates that lock”, which create a sense of separation that the narrator feels from others and the outside world. In addition, the room in which she is confined contains a “heavy bedstead, and… barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on”. These physical and ‘prison-like’ restrictions imposed on the protagonist clearly demonstrate her lack of freedom. Additionally, Gilman’s use of syndetic listing to describe the narrator’s physical entrapment is perhaps reflective of her feelings of suffocation and her inability to escape as the list feels never ending. Essentially, it is the physical and subsequent metaphorical entrapment of the female protagonist by her husband in The Yellow Wallpaper that leads to a loss of her identity.

The author of the Yellow Wallpaper is Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860—1935), an outstanding American feminist, writer, novelist and so on. During her life, Gilman has written so many poetry and short stories. She is a utopian feminist and is honored as a role model for future generations of females due to her odd concepts and lifestyle. The Yellow Wallpaper is not the first or the longest work of her, but it is a best-seller of all her works. In this short story, Gilman devotes the work to the role of females. The book is also known as semi-autobiography of Charlotte. The story is about a woman who suffered from mental illness after giving birth to her little daughter. She knows that she is ill, as well her husband and her brother. To cure her, her husband let her stay in a room with nothing to do, just rest. Especially, for the sake of her health, she cannot read or write, which is the favorite thing of her, even she thinks that reading and writing is helpful to her health, but her husband forbids it. The yellow wallpaper of this room so attracted her that she becomes insane at last. In this book, Gilman mostly illustrate how the woman’s lack of freedom both in their mental and emotional in the patriarchal society. The husband in the book is a doctor, but he cannot treat his wife, even make her insane by his fault rest cure treatment. As for the heroine, the wife in the book, maybe become insane is also a

Lee Maracle’s “Charlie” goes through multiple shifts in mood over the course of the story. These mood are ones of hope and excitement as Charlie and his classmates escape the residential school to fear of the unknown and melancholy as Charlie sets off alone for home ending with despair and insidiousness when Charlie finally succumbs to the elements . Lee highlights these shifts in mood with the use of imagery and symbolism in her descriptions of nature.

It characterizes the narrator's energetic and lively self as she remembers the details that stuck out the most. The narrator illustrates the environment around her in the first paragraph, the locust, the heat, and the greenery and represents her summers with the statement, “Life was measured in summers,”. The second paragraph quickly introduces the cherry bomb, which is also the title of the story, but swiftly changes the subject to the Hairy Man. The third paragraph discusses her hiding spot for her box and the fourth illustrates Eddy’s injury with the cherry bomb. The last paragraph pulls the story together and explains the significance of the cherry bomb. “It was the first thing anybody ever gave me.” It creates a bittersweet memory as even though there were bad times, there was always a optimistic side to everything. It is ironic that the cherry bomb, although it caused some damage, was “a sort of memento of good

Her descriptions of the room, with the furniture seemingly being nailed to the floor and the windows being “barred” show an underlying understanding that her thoughts and personality is being confined. The irony present in this description, due to her belief that the room used to be a nursery, shows her early denial of her husband’s dominance over her. As the story progresses and she begins to see the woman behind the wallpaper, the reader is exposed to the narrator’s realization that she is the one that is actually being suppressed. The descriptions of the wallpaper, showing how confining it is for the symbolic woman behind it, shows how the narrator is being trapped by those bars in both her marriage and in her mental illness. Thus when she says, “At night in any kind of light… it becomes bars,” the reader is shown how restricted the narrator feels, reflected through the wallpaper. In her society, it is the woman that is left to be alone in her own thoughts, shown through her husband’s freedom to leave the house and not come back until he wants to versus her confinement to the house. This is reflected through the various “hedges and walls and gates that lock”, making her stay isolated in the house. Ultimately, the character is overtaken by the imagination and through the

Flannery O’Connor uses style, tone, and character to tell the story of a family and a band of misfits as they struggle with good over evil in the Southern Gothic short story ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ (Kirszner & Mandell, 2012). The style and tone of the characters are depicted in a way that makes it difficult to feel compassion or sympathy for them. The figurative language and style used by the author depicts characters with casual, informal, and extreme Southern stereotypes, diction and attitudes. The tone of the story is ironic in regard to both the characters and plot. O’Connor uses colorful language to describe the characters of the story in a way that allows the reader to vividly see the characters as cartoon like, grotesque, and exaggerated.

The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story full of imaginative symbolism and descriptive settings. However, without the narrator’s unique point of view and how it affects her perception of her environment, the story would fail to inform the reader of the narrator’s emotional plummet. The gothic function of the short story is to allow the reader to be with the narrator as she gradually loses her sanity and the point of view of the narrator is key in ensuring the reader has an understanding of the narrator’s emotional and mental state throughout the story.

In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator is suffering from postpartum depression. The narrator 's husband John, who also happens to be her physician, prescribes the rest cure to help lift his wife of her depressive state and ultimately heal her depression. However, the rest cure does not allow the narrator to experience any mental stimulation. Therefore, to manage her boredom the narrator begins obsessing over the pattern of the yellow wallpaper. After analyzing the pattern for awhile, the narrator witnesses a woman trapped behind bars. Eventually, we realize that the woman in the wallpaper is the narrator. Throughout the story, the narrator 's mental state continues to deteriorate. Being both the narrator 's husband and physician, John assumes that he knows what’s best for his wife. However, in this essay, I will argue that Gilman portrays John as an antagonist or “villain” in her story because, through his actions, he is the main reason for his wife 's descent into insanity which proves that he didn’t know what was best for his wife after all. Therefore, John represents the bars of the wallpaper which confines the woman and doesn 't allow her to be free.

The protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper anthropomorphizes the floral elements of the yellow wallpaper, wherein wallpaper is typically a feminine floral decoration on wall interiors. These elements signify the scrutiny Victorian society makes of lives of its womenfolk, particularly of women who are creative and insubordinate to their spouses. The protagonist is one such woman; her writing denounces her imaginative character and the surreptitious persistence of her writing denounces her matrimonial and feminine disobedience which were considered radical in her contemporary society. Gilman expresses the suppression felt by women from societal scrutiny to be one of “strangling”, through the narrator, who in one instance describes the wallpaper pattern like so: “it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads… the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!” Her anthropomorphizing of the pattern of the wallpaper adopts a grimmer facet when she writes that “when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide.” It is also significant to note that the narrator describes the pattern as suicidal because it again emphasizes the narrator’s desperate, almost suicidal, need to flee the imprisonment of the nursery and from the oppressive, male-dominant society that the room and its wallpaper represent. Asides of the pattern, there are many probable connotations of the yellow colour of the wallpaper, for instance with jaundiced illness, and also the rigid oppression of masculine sun. While sickness can be associated with the colour yellow, its more established motif would seem be the conflict between the masculine sun and the feminine moon. In Gilman’s story, sunlight is linked with John’s

The excerpt from Maxine Clair’s story “Cherry Bomb” represents a child's world interpreted from the viewpoint of an adult. Maxine Claire also uses figurative language, symbolism, thematic parallels, and variations of tone in order to represent a more sophisticated grownup perception of her childhood memories of her fifth grade summer world. However despite the complex language involved, Maxine Clair still maintains the innocent, naive, childish viewpoint of her summer memories in this excerpt.

At the very core of humanity and its behavior lies mistakes and wrongdoings. No matter how intensively they may try to stay faithful, every person occasionally betrays their moral conscience. This trespass has been interpreted in countless forms of literature and media ever since the written and verbal word has existed. Gary Soto’s A Summer Life is a powerful example, using diverse forms of rhetoric to convey his cycle of initial pleasure, guilt, and eventual remorse over the measures taken place in the autobiographical narrative. The author uses vivid imagery, allegorical symbolism, and thought provoking biblical allusions to change a recreation of something one-dimensional, such as stealing a pie, into a six-year-old undergoing an ethical dilemma.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a married couple is getting their house renovated, and they rent a spooky house for three months. The wife believes she sees creepy things happening in the house but the husband disagrees and says everything is fine. During the short story, Gilman vividly describes the setting of the house to be a gloomy, mysterious place that she calls a “haunted house.” Gilman is trying to show that the woman is not allowed to present her expressions of the house to her husband, and she does not get to show her feelings, because he shows authority in the marriage. But eventually, she escapes her husband when he ends up trapping her, and she crawls over him to be able to

“Young Goodman Brown” is a tale about a man experiencing evil and having his life changed forever due to the experience. While it is said that this story may simply be a dream, the progression of the events that occur leave the main character changed for life. Using a psychoanalytical approach, it can be proved that that the main character, Goodman Brown, is not who he seems to be and is riddled with dysfunctional behavior. Scholarly Journal Articles by authors Joan Elizabeth Easterly and Patrick W. Shaw can be used to provide evidence that the main character of this story displays behaviors that are not considered to be in good taste by today’s standards. Overall, Goodman Brown is a vessel of dysfunctional behavior and this is portrayed through the use of symbolism, antics, and actions that occur throughout the story.