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Modern American Literature: Rise of Realism

Choose one of the stories to apply feminist criticism to the reading. Identify the protagonist and antagonist and describe their relationship as it relates to the theme. How does the relationship to the foil, if there is one, reflect the theme? Identify whether the protagonist is round or flat, dynamic or static. Support your response with examples from the text.
 * Chopin’s “Story of and Hour” and Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”**

In Gilman’s __The Yellow Wallpaper__, there is a physician named John and his wife Jane who is ill. He takes his ill wife away from her usual setting to a different setting in hopes of helping her get better. His hopes were ruined as she only became worse. The wife felt she knew how to get better, but her husband being a man, thought he knew better. Jane would be considered the protagonist in the story. She is out seeking her own way to get better. She feels if she wasn’t so isolated she would feel better. But John, who would be considered the antagonist, insists that she stay isolated because she’s not ready to be around others. The relationship between the two is nothing more than a husband telling his wife what is best for her simply because he is a man and she is a woman. As though Jane could be perfectly capable of knowing how to treat herself as she explains in the text. She explains to John what she likes and doesn’t like and what she thinks is best. Feminist criticism is applied here because it defines who should know best based on gender. Jane is a round character who seems to have many sides to her. Throughout the text she seems to have multiple personalities. She is dynamic because the lesson she learns is not to always listen to others including her husband. Their actions reflect their relationship. How he acts towards her shows how what their relationship is based on. The theme of the story is that one man’s control is a woman’s insanity. John controlling his wife and not listening to her desires caused her to go insane. People more of the masculine description sometimes think they are in control, when the feminist person could know better.

//Good work developing your definitions of the lit term (protagonist/antagonist, round/flat, etc.) and explaining how they connect to the character. I'd like you to go further by describing specific examples from the text.//

Select an example of imagery that creates the mood of the story? How does the mood of the setting reflect the character’s motivations driven by their id, ego, and superego?
 * Crane’s “Mystery of Heroism”**

How does the author indirectly characterize the protagonist through the use of dialect? What does this tell us about the character? How are they influenced by their id, ego, or superego?
 * Wharton’s “April Showers” and Twain’s “The Invalid’s Story”**