Poe and Gilman RJ

AP Lang

Poe and Perkins Gilman Journal

POE

1.    Read the Poe first.  Because you may be familiar with the storyline, make sure you note any surprises or elements of the story you don’t remember.  On your first read:  Follow the general guidelines for your reading journal.  (This may be a good time to go back and look at those. ☺)

2.    On your second read:  Pay careful attention to Poe’s language.  Note the level of vocabulary, the diction choices in establishing and maintaining a mood, the assonance and alliteration and consonance.  (Look up those terms before you begin to be sure you know what you’re looking for. ☺)

3.    Finally, chart the rhythm and pace in the entire story.  Make sure you use specific descriptors here.  Also note the use of loose (sentences that are constructed in a S-V grammatical structure) and periodic (sentences that force the reader to wait until the end for the S-V) sentences.  Make note of what is happening in the plot in relation to the pace and rhythm and sentence types.

PERKINS GILMAN

1.    Read the Gilman.  I strongly urge you to read it at least three times.  Note the obvious

       connections between the two stories, and be very specific.

2.    Note the significant departures from Poe in the Gilman.

3.    What can you say about the Gilman story regarding issues of power and authority?

4.    As the narrator begins to interpret the wallpaper, she becomes wholly taken up with

       figuring it out.  She says that her life “is very much more exciting now than it used to be. 

       You see I have something more to expect, to look forward to, to watch.”  A bit later she

       says, “I don’t want anybody to get that woman out at night but myself.”  Finally, she

       concludes with a confusion of pronouns that merges into a grammatical statement of

       identity:

As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her.

              I pulled and she shook, and I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.

             What do you make of that?  “I don’t know” is, obviously, an unacceptable answer. 

             Use what we’ve discussed with Nabokov and Perrine to try to come up with a plausible

             answer to what’s going on in this story.

5.    When does the narrator’s descent into madness begin?  How does the answer to

       that question affect your reading of the whole?

COME TO CLASS WITH YOUR RIGHT-HAND SIDE COMPLETED.  KEEP IN MIND THAT YOU MUST DO IT ALL.  IT SHOULD BE YOUR BEST ATTEMPT AT CRITICAL READING AND ANALYSIS.  COME TO CLASS WITH AN IDEA OF WHAT YOU WANT TO DISCUSS IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND THESE STORIES AND THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THEM BETTER.