Class Activity

• Form Groups

• Group Discussion (15 min.)

After introductions all around, each student should share a relevant commonplace quote from "The Yellow Wallpaper."  Groupmates should offer several observations about the significance of the selection, then the CPB author should share his/her commentary (read it verbatim or summarize it). The ranking member (alphabetically!) should moderate, making sure each person has a chance to share their CPB and that each group member offers some comment. 

Choose the most interesting quotation for sharing with the whole class; if the handwriting is not ideal, have a groupmate recopy it for Sherwood to share with the class.  (If time permits, compare which passages you and groupmates chose to mark in the margins.

• Sherwood's Introduction of Gilman's "Yellow Wallpaper"
• Round-Robin Review of groups' best CPBs

• Question for Reflection (or Blog?): On Author/ity and "The Yellow Wallpaper"

This story is probably most often read in terms of the conflict between a confined, post-partum mother/wife and her antagonist (husband, paternalistic medicine, her own mind, roles for 19th c. women).  How would we need to reframe our thinking about Gilman's story if we were to focus on the narrator as a female writer? How might questions about who can write, who one has to be in order to write, the power and threat of authoring be relevant?  See "Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper"

Courses | Sherwood |IUP English | IUP
Last Updated: 09 December, 2008