 So I hope you all had a good reading break and you were refreshed and while on reading break you had plenty of time to read the novella and the short story that we're assigned for today. Today I'm gonna start with a little bit of an interlude before I get into what we're actually going to be talking about the two texts. So I wanna start with a step back into the late 19th, early 20th century and examine the ways in which terms like madness and monstrosity were used and might be connected to each other for people living in this time period. So of course we know today, madness is not a legitimate medical diagnosis. Doctors don't use this term, but at the time we're looking at, psychiatrists regularly referred to their patients as mad. And there was something unsettling about the way madness played out in the 19th century and there was a relationship between madness and animality. So I have here a quotation from Michel Foucault, a ginormous book called The History of Madness that came out in the 1970s. And I wanna draw your attention to this. So the key point is that fits of madness are seen as a kind of animal freedom. When the thought was that when you went into a fit of madness, you were relinquishing this kind of human rational part of yourself and giving into a sort of animal freedom. Metamorphosis into an animal. Huh, you can see why I chose this quote. Metamorphosis into an animal was no longer an indication of the power of the devil, the animal in man was in itself his madness with no reference to anything other than itself, his madness in a natural state. So why do I wanna draw your attention to this? We've looked at several monsters or portrayals of monsters this year over the course of the year. And the monsters have often in some cases been connected to the devil, to Satan, to demons. So here's a few examples. I've got a picture of Grendel there. We know we talked about Cain and the connection there. Caliban, so we've had a few monsters that have been monstrous in part because of their identification with something devilish or satanic. But by the 19th century, we have kind of a medicalization of monstrosity and animality. That somebody is an animal and or a monster not because they're connected to the devil but because somehow they have become medically mad. However, that's cashed out. And the reason I wanted to talk about this today is because the two texts we're looking at are both dealing with the animal and with madness. And so by looking at the two texts together, we can look at the relationship that might exist between the 19th century conception of madness and the 19th century conception of humans and animals. So that brings us to what we're actually talking about today. We've got a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper, and a novella by Franz Kafka Metamorphosis. And today what I think is really interesting about both these texts is that these texts actually allow the monsters to speak in their own words. So we've had examples of monsters speaking in the past, most notably Frankenstein's creature. But if you remember from Kevin's lecture, the creature's dialogue is filtered through a number of different narrators. So he's not genuinely speaking to himself or speaking for himself, rather. What's really interesting though about the texts that you read over Reading Break is that these monsters, insofar as they are monsters, are speaking. And yet they're only speaking to you, the narrator. So one case that I wanna make as we work through these is that they're not really being heard by the people around them in the narration, but they are speaking to you as you read it. So these two stories have a lot in common, a lot of superficial things in common that you might have noticed. There's a lot of discussion of rooms, doors and locks. There's some tension and family dynamics. In the case of The Yellow Wallpaper, there's a marriage that seems a little bit tense. And then in the case of the Metamorphosis, we have a whole family kind of playing off of each other and some power struggles and power relations. We have weird illnesses that might be a little bit surprising. So we have the illness in The Yellow Wallpaper, obviously. And then we have Gregor Samsa turning into a bug, which is a pretty bizarre illness, honestly. I'll return to that. And there seems to be a lack of communication. So there are a lot of ways in which it makes sense to pair these two texts. But when we think about the authors of the two texts and in particular, the motivation that the authors both have when it comes to actually conceiving what they're doing when writing fiction, you might think that the two texts don't actually belong together. So Gilman lived from 1860 to 1935. And there's a way in which the text that you're reading The Yellow Wallpaper is semi-autobiographical. So if you've read a little bit of the essay that goes along with the text, you'll know that Gilman herself was diagnosed as ill. Her doctor prescribed that she sit in her room and do nothing, no reading, no writing, no interacting with anyone. This was called The Resting Cure, and it was a quite common prescription given to especially women who were diagnosed with hysteria. So we'll get into that. Gilman became diagnosed with hysteria after giving birth similar to the character in The Yellow Wallpaper. So there's a lot of ways in which the text is drawing on Gilman's own experience. What do we know about Kafka? If you read a little bit about Kafka's biography in your text The Metamorphosis, you'll know that Kafka lived at home until he was 30. So he was surrounded by his family members much as Gregor Samso was. You'll know that Kafka worked a clerical job that he didn't find terribly rewarding. Might sound kind of similar to the character in the text. And that this is something you may not know as well. Kafka had a lot of trouble in interactions with women. So he had an extended engagement that he finally broke off, and in general it seems that Kafka had trouble identifying with Wilman as both humans and people that he was attracted to sexually. So he had a lot of trouble balancing sexual attraction with believing somebody was an intelligent human being that he could interact with. So there's a lot of conflict when it came to his relationships with women. And you might see the same kind of thing in Gregor Samso possibly. So there's ways in which both texts seem to be partially autobiographical. And yet as I said, there's a way in which each author approaches what they're doing with literature in a very different way. So that short essay attached to the yellow wallpaper where Gilman explains why she wrote the yellow wallpaper tells us that it was not intended to drive people crazy but to save people from being driven crazy and it worked. So she wrote this short story with a definite goal in mind. There's something that she wanted to accomplish. In fact, Gilman tends to do this with everything that she ever wrote. All of it has a distinct message and a distinct purpose in her mind. And she is writing these texts in order to accomplish a goal. And that's one thing that she thought was really powerful about literature. So from another essay that she wrote, the effects of literature upon the mind, she tells us the power of the artist to enlarge our world of feeling, to lift and carry less favored souls into a richer life, to put his feeling into a mortal form and leave it pouring light and strength, peace, patience or courage, beauty or terror down the ages is as noble a work as the world knows. She really believes that you can use literature to expose people to ideas, to ways of being, to emotions, to situations that people wouldn't normally be exposed to. And that through doing so, you can enliven and enrich somebody's world and possibly change their mind. And she often does this when she writes that she has specific goals for each of her narratives. By contrast, when we look at Kafka and his writing, it often seems that he doesn't really have an idea of exactly what he wants to attain with his writing so much as that he's just writing what occurs to him. So you have this text in your collection here. The text is the judgment. We didn't ask you to read it, so don't worry about it. But we have a recorded letter of Kafka to a friend of his where he says, can you discover any meaning in the judgment, some straightforward, coherent meaning that one could follow? I can't find any, nor can I explain anything in it. This might be a bit odd to you because we've been reading a lot of authors and a lot of work by authors where the authors will express, this is why I wrote this. So before the break, we did the wasteland and it came with a lot of extra stuff from Elliot and from other people trying to explain why they wrote it and what they were trying to do. Gilman herself, that text comes with an essay trying to explain why she wrote it and what she was trying to do. And here we have Kafka going, I don't know. I don't know why I wrote this. I don't know what it means. It just came to me and I wrote it, don't ask me. And that seems to be his attitude regarding most of the things he wrote. They were just these things that he felt he had to get down, but he doesn't necessarily have a larger agenda. So it might seem odd to pair the metamorphosis with the yellow wallpaper because both authors have such a divergent perspective on the place of literature and the power of literature and exactly what their literature was doing. But today I will make the claim that these two stories, despite the different attitudes from their authors, have more than just this superficial similarity in common. So I want to say that they explore how the establishing of the norm, particularly by an authority figure, the establishing of what's normal is related to illness, monstrosity and animality. And that this is all explored through allowing the monster to speak, but speak only to a select audience, only to you, the reader. So that's what we're gonna be looking at. Now this reading that I'm giving you is just one way of reading either of these texts. Both texts have a lot going on in them. And I do not have time to discuss everything going on in them. So this is just one interpretation. It is not the interpretation. It's not the only way in which these two texts are similar or contrasting. And of course, if you take each text in isolation, there's a lot more going on there. So I'm gonna start with the yellow wallpaper. And I'm gonna be looking at four things in the yellow wallpaper. I'm gonna examine the setting. I'm going to expand in the family dynamic, which in this case consists mostly of the marriage. There is a sister involved as well, but I don't have time to deal with her today. So you can talk about her perhaps in your seminars. I'm gonna look at the illness. And of course, I'm going to look at the wallpaper. So let's start with the setting. They move out to a house in the country. And we are told by our narrator that this is a really rare opportunity. It's very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. Isn't that great? Ancestral halls. So they're staying in this grand mansion that has a lot of weight of tradition and ancestry behind it. In fact, our narrator kind of hopes it has ghosts and stuff around, but it turns out that her husband, John, says that's just fanciful, and so they drop that. But it's notable that she considers her and her husband to be pretty ordinary people, and here they are in this setting that is old, ancestral, and carries a weight of tradition. So we'll come back to that. What else do we know about this house? We're told it's quite alone, standing well back from the road, quite three miles from the village. There are hedges, walls, gates, that lock, and separate little houses all over the place for the gardeners and the people. This is a really ordered, structured place that they've come to. Everything is divided off. There are hedges, there are walls, there are gates. People have their certain places where they belong, different people in different places, and so the whole house not only carries a weight of tradition, but also seems very, very ordered. So think about that as well as we're reading through this text. So maybe the house looks a bit like this. I don't know. This is just a house I found. I don't claim that this is the house, but it's helpful because the house has an upstairs and a downstairs, which is going to be pretty important when it comes to talking about the setting. So if you'll remember, they arrive at the house and there's a little bit of an argument between our narrator and John about where they're going to take up residence, where they're going to have the bedroom. And eventually we end up at the top of the house. Why? Because our narrator is told that she needs to have perfect rest and all the air I could get. And the top of the house is very airy. It's got windows all around, it's open, it's very restful, apparently. There's a big airy room, the whole floor nearly, with windows that look all ways and air and sunshine galore. I want to make the case to you that there's a parallel here going on with the setting and with the perspective of John in particular, that it seems that the top of the house is representing something kind of rational, airy and detached, up, elevated, away from the ground, away from mundane things, away from life, that it's able to see in all directions, windows all the way around, that it seems kind of objective, looking out from this high perspective on the world below, detached, if you like. And so I've labeled the top of the house as objective possibly, rational possibly, because it's detached away from the emotions and a God's eye view of some sort, above everything else, elevated. If you'll remember, our narrator actually wanted to take up residence down below in the garden room. So after they move into the top room, the narrator says, I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened onto the piazza and had roses all over the window, such pretty old-fashioned chintz paintings, but John wouldn't hear of it. He said there was only one window, only one window. So instead of this kind of open, airy, objective, detached perspective, the narrator wants to be on the ground floor, closer to nature, closer to living things, closer to the dirt and the mess of life. And so there's a way in which the ground floor of this house seems to represent possibly something more emotional as opposed to rational and detached, possibly something more subjective, and that there's one window, a perspective on the world from the ground floor of the house that's being ignored by this airy top floor. So already the house shows us differing perspectives and clashes of perspectives. And where do they end up? They end up upstairs. So John wins. He wins that battle. They end up on the top floor. This might remind you of something else too. Remember when Rob gave his lecture, he talked about philosophers wanting to detach themselves from the world and contemplate triangles, not have to deal with the messy day-to-day stuff of life. There's a way in which the top floor of this house seems to represent that, a physical detachment from the rest of the world, an elevation of reason. And we're gonna come back to this Platonic image again, because there's a lot going on in not only this text, but also the Kafka text, calling for reason to dominate over emotion, that emotion should be subdued to reason. And so our narrator is literally put in the part of the house that seems to represent reason and told to dominate her own emotions to become more rational. So that's a bit of a discussion of this setting, but in discussing the setting, we've already talked a little bit about the marriage. Because of course, as we talked about the setting, we talked about the struggle between John and our narrator about where they were going to have their bedroom. But let's look at the marriage, because our narrator's attitude towards the marriage changes interestingly through this text. So at the start, it seems that our narrator is quite happy with the marriage. At least that's the way she speaks about it. You might wonder if she's actually telling the truth in this journal that she's keeping. So she says, John is practical in the extreme. He is very caring and loving. Dear John, he loves me very dearly and hates to have me sick. So she seems to feel that John is taking care of her and that he's a good husband. Then things start changing about halfway through this short story. Our narrator says, and I've highlighted it in blue, it is so hard to talk with John about my case because he is so wise and because he loves me so. So there's a sense here about halfway through the text that communication is breaking down, that our narrator doesn't feel that she's able to tell John about the way she's experiencing her illness, about how she's feeling, about whatever her case is because she feels that it doesn't work. He's too wise, he's so wise maybe that he intimidates her. He loves her so much that she doesn't want to upset him by talking to him about the things that are going wrong or about the way she feels. This I think represents a turning point. The less she's able to communicate with John, the more there seems to be a breakdown as we move through this story. The more she mistrusts him. She mistrusts his goals, she mistrusts his motives and the more she mistrusts him, the less she's able to communicate him until we get these kind of sentences. The fact is, I am getting a little afraid of John. Or finally, near the end, he asked me all sorts of questions too and pretended to be very loving and kind as if I couldn't see through him. Now he's pretending to be loving instead of actually being loving. Now you might wonder at what point is the narrator actually tapping into what's really going on in this dynamic? Both this text and the Kafka text seem to suffer a little bit from what we call an unreliable narrator. What do I mean by an unreliable narrator? Anyone? Yeah, yeah, the narrator can't necessarily be trusted to tell you what's really going on. So what you might wonder in this marriage dynamic and something for you to think about is where, is there a place in which the narrator now can be more trusted? Could she be more trusted at the start? Is she more trustworthy at the end? Because her perspective on the marriage changes. So at what point, if any, do you think the perspective is more trusted? Which brings me to the illness. The thing that is actually going wrong, the thing that is causing this breakdown of communication, the thing that caused the entire move to the country in the first place, is this illness that the narrator is told she has. So on the one hand, she's proclaimed not to be sick and you'll see this over and over again. She tells us that John doesn't really believe she's sick or that there's no reason to be sick or that her case is really a mild one or that she's really getting better when she actually feels worse. So over and over again, she's told from John and from her doctor that actually things aren't nearly as bad as she might think they are. Now remember, John is a doctor too. So we have her doctor and her husband who is also a doctor, both people in positions of authority telling her that she isn't really sick or she isn't as sick as she might think she is. On the other hand, she actually does have a diagnosis in this text. So we're told that she suffers from a temporary nervous depression and a slight hysterical tendency. So she's nervous and she's hysterical. This is an actual diagnosis. It is also the diagnosis that Gilman received from her doctor. So this might be weird. How can she be not sick and yet at the same time be diagnosed with a disorder? One way of reading this text is to discuss the way in which psychiatry seems to have failed the patient in this case in this 19th century text. And I can show the progression between 19th century psychiatry and 21st century psychiatry. This isn't a reading I'm going to give but I'm going to talk about it very briefly. So you might wonder what would she be diagnosed with now? And the hint comes on page two. When we're told it's fortunate Mary is so good with the baby, such a dear baby. And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous. Any guesses? Yeah. Probably postpartum depression. That's usually what people say, yeah. And it's likely that a 21st century psychological diagnosis would have diagnosed Gilman with the same thing. So there's one way of reading this text which talks about the authority and the weight of authority that psychiatrists have and that they need to be careful with their diagnoses and furthermore that more needed to be done in terms of understanding women's bodies and women's health. That is one way of reading this text and of understanding this text. That's not the reading that I'm going to give but I want you to know that it is a possibility. Instead I wanna look at the way in which hysteria nervosa was understood in the 19th century in particular. So this was a psychological disorder in the 19th century. It was a category of psychological disorders and you could be diagnosed with this disorder. And Gilman was. So here is a letter from Gil, or sorry, not a letter, an excerpt from a book that Charlotte Perkins Gilman's doctor, Dr. Mitchell actually wrote. The book was called Doctor and Patient and it devoted quite a lot of time to discussing in particular female patients and female illness because that's what he spent most of his medical practice doing. Now before you write off Gilman's doctor he was a pretty prestigious doctor at the time. He was recognized as a leader in his field and people deferred to his authority. And this is an excerpt of what he said about the end of hysteria nervosa. When you've cured someone from hysteria nervosa what the feeling was like and how you go on from here. He said, when you sit beside a woman you have saved from mournful years of feebleness and set afoot to taste anew the joy of wholesome life. Nothing seems easier than with hope at your side and a chorus of gratitude in the woman's soul to show her how she had failed and to make clear to her how she is to regain and preserve domination over her emotions. Nor is it then less easy to point out how the moral failures which were the outcome of sickness may be atoned for in the future now that she has been taught to see their meaning their evils for herself and their sad influence on the lives of others. So in the 19th century if you were diagnosed with hysteria nervosa somehow your doctor had to convince you to save yourself by gaining power over your emotions. Regain and preserve domination over your emotions. Control those emotions. And that this illness isn't just a medical illness in the 19th century it is a moral failing. You are responsible for making yourself sick in the 19th century and it is up to you to fix it. And once you have fixed it you now have to atone for this illness and for any bad things that came out of this illness and not just for yourself because it could have caused evils to you but atone for the way in which you have harmed others. We see this come up in the text over and over again. The narrator lamenting that things are so hard for John that things are so hard for the baby that John has been so good to her and she feels guilty because she cannot help. So there is a guilt laden onto this illness in the 19th century. To some degree this stigma of psychological disorders and moral guilt is still present with us today. Though it is no longer something that doctors and psychiatrists will say is legitimate. So the 19th century is different because the authority figures themselves were saying that this was a moral failing which brings me back of course to Plato. Remember Plato said that you had to properly order your soul and that the proper order would have to have reason at the top and then spirit and then your appetites or your animal emotions, your instincts. And so Plato's perfect soul is actually shockingly still with us in the 19th century and having some kind of resonance with 19th century psychiatry with the idea that reason needs to govern the emotions and that is your responsibility to try and order your soul in such a way that your reason will govern your emotions. I think it also should remind us of Nietzsche. So remember this is the quasi thesis that I identified in Nietzsche's genealogy of morals for you. I understood the ever-spreading morality of pity that had seized even on the philosophers and made them ill as the most sinister symptom of a European culture that had itself become sinister, perhaps as its bypass to a new Buddhism for Europeans to nihilism. I especially wanna draw your attention at first to the idea of a morality of pity because it seems that there's a way in which a lot of pity and guilt is being factored into this text that our narrator feels guilty, she feels that others are taking pity on her and we see that again with Gilman's doctor that he says, if I can go back to it, which I will briefly, there he is, that the woman comes to you with a chorus of gratitude in her soul. She is grateful for the pity that you as her doctor have shown her and for the way in which you have helped her. So there's this labeling of a morality of pity here attached to this illness. And if you remember from Nietzsche, he actually thinks the more you try and control yourself and police yourself in order to properly fit in to the morality of pity, the more you are making yourself ill. And I think that theme can be seen here as well. The idea that the more our narrator tries to police herself in order to fit into what John thinks is correct, the more she just seems to make herself ill. I want to also draw your attention to how these disorders came about in the 19th century. So if you remember Freud from a few weeks ago, this is actually something I didn't get to talk about in the lecture, but it's right near the end of the Freud text. He says, in an individual neurosis, we take as our starting point the contrast that distinguishes the patient from his environment, which is assumed to be normal. So where does the normal come from when you're diagnosing someone according to Freud? What is assumed to be normal? Or who is assumed to be normal? Yeah? Yeah, the surrounding families surrounding people, people in the culture. So the normal is set by the people around you. They serve as the norm, and if you don't fit into that norm, that can allow for a diagnosis of neuroses, which means that normal is relative. I actually have that on a sign at home thing. Okay, so what's assumed to be normal is whatever everybody around you is doing, and if you don't fit in with whatever anybody around you is doing, then you can be diagnosed with some kind of disorder. And this happened a lot, especially to women in the 19th century. So here we have Gilman's doctor, Mitchell, again, saying the woman's desire to be on a level of competition with man and to assume his duties is, I am sure, making mischief. It's only causing problems. It's causing women to reach past their normalized station, and it's going to cause them to be ill. And then here we have Renee Dargasson, a lieutenant in the police. So law enforcement also participated in this. A 16-year-old woman publicly proclaims that she will never love her husband and that there is no law ordering that she should do so. That everyone is free to use their own heart and body as they please, but that it is a sort of crime to give one without the other. On hearing such impertinence, I was strongly tempted to consider her mad because she is abnormal. Women agitating for the vote were abnormal and could be considered mad, could be classified and diagnosed with hysteria. So this idea that the normal is set by the community also feeds into the story itself. We have the narrator and her husband living in a house that has a weight of tradition behind it. This is an old house, a house that stands for the grandest traditions in the society, a house that itself could represent the metaphors of the norms of society. How does this play out in the text? The narrator says, John doesn't know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer and that satisfies him. As though the suffering itself didn't exist because it doesn't have a rational basis, he can't make sense of it. He says, no one but myself can help me out of it, the illness, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me. You see, he does not believe I am sick. So repeatedly, our narrator is given the message that it is her responsibility to fit into the norm and that she is morally at fault if she cannot fit into the norm and that her own exception will not be tolerated. John will not move from his perspective. She has to shift to fit in with his sense of the world. So she's told over and over again that reason and self-control must master the emotions. She is treated as ill and is held responsible for her own illness. So that brings us back to the house. I think that one way of understanding this text is that John's perspective denies the reality of our narrator's experience. He claims to see everything because he's objective, he's elevated, he's rational, he's detached, he's a doctor, he has authority, and yet he doesn't see things from her point of view and he doesn't even seem to think that there's any reason he should see things from her point of view. She must conform to his point of view. And there's one more way in which we get a metaphor for this in the room itself before we even talk about the wallpaper and that's with reference to the marriage bed. So our narrator says, I lie here on this great immovable bed, it is nailed down, I believe, and I follow the pattern about by the hour. The bed is immovable, it's immense, and it's nailed to the floor. Why would a bed be nailed to the floor? So it cannot be moved. Just like John cannot be moved. His perspective doesn't have to shift. Our narrator has to shift. Which brings me finally to the wallpaper. What are we told about this wallpaper? It is dull enough to confuse the I am following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame and certain curves for a little distance, they suddenly commit suicide. Plunge off at outrageous angles destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions. The wallpaper doesn't seem to be very rational. It contradicts itself. It starts a pattern and then the pattern kind of disappears and then you might find the pattern again but you can't make sense of how this new pattern fit with the old pattern. But our narrator says I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion. She is driven to make sense out of something that seems nonsensical. At this point in the reading of the text, maybe that sounded familiar to you. They stood to me. I was like, oh my God, I'm trying to make sense of something that doesn't make any sense. You guys, the wallpaper is the wasteland. No, I'm only half joking here. I actually do think that there's a bit of an interesting resemblance between how the narrator tries to deal with the yellow wallpaper and my and perhaps your experience of trying to deal with the wasteland. Trying to find a pattern that seems acceptable, that seems normal, trying to make sense of something that keeps defying your ability to make sense of it. It is incomprehensible, it is disturbing, it is frustrating, but remember that our narrator is trying to find an acceptable order and meaning in this wallpaper. And then we learn a little bit more. As the text progresses, the wallpaper actually seems to take on a life of its own, perhaps becoming a character itself or multiple characters in this story. The narrator says, the paper looks to me as if it knew what a vicious influence it had. There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lulls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare out at you upside down. So it's kind of all these like choked off heads sticking out through the pattern of the wallpaper with protruding eyes. Lulls like a broken neck, like people who've been strangled or killed and now they can't see. And finally we learn that there's somebody trapped in the wallpaper, a woman behind the wallpaper who shakes the wallpaper violently at night trying to get out. And our narrator says, and she is all the time trying to climb through, but nobody could climb through that pattern, it strangles so. I think that is why it has so many heads. So it seems there's a pattern that our narrator can't make any sense of. The pattern itself has multiple heads that are strangled in it and somebody behind it trying to climb out. In effect, I think the wallpaper can represent the relationship that our narrator has with John. Here is John with his objective, rational, elevated, detached perspective that our narrator doesn't know how to fit into, that she's trying to make sense of and that she's trying to occupy herself so that she can overcome her moral failing. But this objective perspective denies the reality of many other perspectives in the same way that the wallpaper strangles these multiple heads and actually leaves them sightless. So what is perspective if not sight? And we have these broken necks and bulbous eyes that aren't seen anything anymore. And now we have somebody trapped behind the wallpaper that can't get out, somebody who cannot express the way they are feeling or the way they are experiencing the world in the same way that our narrator cannot express her life and her experiences to John. So when we look at the yellow wallpaper, when we examine the setting, the marriage, the illness and finally the wallpaper, there's a way in which I think what's happening is that consistently perspectives are being denied. That order and singularity are strangling plurality and emotion. Such that an emotional perspective, our narrator's perspective, the perspective at the bottom of the house is not being able to speak. Remember she tells us that it is such a relief to write things down in a journal because at least she's able to express herself to get some of her ideas out. There doesn't seem to be any other way that she can get her ideas out. And the longer she is not able to speak, the worse things seem to get. The more time she stands contemplating the wallpaper and the more time she spends alone. And what is the result? As we move through the text, the narrator says it is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. In fact, there's something really curious that happens as we move through this text towards the end. If you remember at the start, this text is for, the narrator is writing a journal in order to tell someone, even though it's really no one, it's dead paper as she says, in order to express to somehow what she's feeling and what she's going through. So she's writing. She's recounting the events of the days and we'll have things like, oh, I have to hide this before John's sister comes up or I haven't felt like writing anything in several days. And so we'll get reminders that this is a journal. And yet by the end, we have this really strange scene that doesn't seem to be a journal entry at all. If that woman does get out, this is the woman behind the paper. If that woman does get out and tries to get away, I can tie her. So the narrator knows John's away for 24 hours. She decides she's finally gonna have it out with this paper. She's gonna tear it down. She brings a rope with her so she can tie this woman up behind the paper. And then what happens? I don't like to look out of the windows even. There are so many of those creeping women and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of the wallpaper as I did. Things start blurring as we move towards the end of this text. Sometimes the narrator refers to herself as the creeping woman as the woman behind the wallpaper. Sometimes she refers to the woman behind the wallpaper as someone she has to trap and subdue. Sometimes she says she's trapped herself and tied herself up so that she can't be thrown away. She's got her rope around herself. And so you start wondering, well, which one is the narrator? In a very superficial way. There seem to be like multiple women creeping all over the place. That's kind of weird. Which one's the narrator? In fact, I think that's the point. And finally, is she writing this? So if you remember the vivid last scene, John comes in, he faints. I'm running it for you if you haven't read it. Anyway, John comes in, he faints and our narrator is creeping along the wall and now she has to climb over John. Is she writing this all down in a journal as she's doing that? Because remember, this is a journal, isn't it? So things become really weird at the end. We seem to kind of lose our narrative frame. This story was framed as journal entries. So we've had lots of frames in the past. Most notably, I'm thinking of Frankenstein, right? Where it was letters. It was framed as letters that Walton was writing to his sister. This is framed as a journal, a secret journal that she's keeping for herself. And you know, when we hit the end of it, I'm now trying to imagine this woman creeping around the edge of the wallpaper with a notebook writing, I am creeping around the edge of the wall. That's weird, isn't it? There's a way in which this narration seems to almost lose its frame here at the end. It doesn't make sense anymore. In addition, the narrator herself seems to have multiplied. There are tons of women creeping everywhere by the end. She's lost her sense of self, her center. The narrative has lost its center, and so has the narrator. So I think the Gilman Yellow wallpaper text shows that the monster being allowed to speak illustrates the power of the norm, in this case, defined by John. John is setting up what is normal and what is taken to be a normative way of being. But the power of the norm allows John and the narrator's doctor to define her as ill. This illness carries with it a sense of morality, that she needs to fix herself, that she needs to make amends for being sick. And the less she is able to speak, the less she is able to express herself to John, the more ill she seems to get. And eventually she becomes this kind of creeping, multiplied being, which isn't quite getting us to animality yet, but if we follow over with Kafka, I think we will get there. When I look at Kafka, I wanna talk about the setting again. This time instead of the marriage, I'm gonna talk about the family, because Gregor Samsa isn't married, obviously, but he's still living with a lot of other people. Instead of the illness, which was the barrier to communication in the yellow wallpaper, I'm just gonna talk about communication in general, because in the Samsa family, it seems that there's a huge problem communicating much of anything. And finally, obviously, I wanna talk about the metamorphosis. Before I get to those, though, there's one thing that I wanna kinda draw up right at the start. Okay, so I'm gonna level with you and tell you a little bit of my first experience reading this many years ago. And I opened the text. Now I'm a fan of science fiction and fantasy, so I'm like, cool, our narrator's a bug. But he's a bug, right? He's a bug, and the first thing he starts worrying about is, oh man, how am I gonna get out of bed? You next, you expect him to be like, how am I gonna button up my shirt? Like, it's the most mundane things that he starts worrying about, but he's a giant bug. Why hasn't he freaked out about that? So the text itself seems really weird, doesn't it? That you start reading it, and then Gregor wakes up and he's some kind of, we don't even know what kind of bug. Some kind of vermin, maybe a beetle, kind of seems like a beetle to me, a beetle crossed with a centipede, because he has a whole bunch of legs. And yet he's all like, oh man, how am I gonna get to work? Really work is the last of your problems, isn't it? You're a bug, I don't know. I think in the fly, I don't think that in the fly, the movie, he spends a lot of time being like, oh man, how am I gonna go to work now, now that I've turned into a fly? Anyway, so you approach this, and it seems really weird that one of the first thoughts Gregor has is, oh Lord, what a strenuous calling I've chosen. Not, oh my God, I'm a bug. Okay. This is very, very typical of Kafka's kind of work. So the text itself, Gregor himself, is a really ordinary guy. He's a really mundane, ordinary guy. He has a job, is a traveling salesman. He supports his family. He doesn't really have big ambitions. I think he seems like a really nice guy. Maybe a little spineless, I mean, before he turned into a bug. But he seems like a pretty decent, ordinary, unassuming guy. And that ordinary narrative just kind of keeps going in his head. Even though Kafka drops this giant surreal bombshell right on top of it. So there's this really weird juxtaposition in the narrative that we have this giant odd bug thing in a world that doesn't seem like a fantasy world, right? No one else is spontaneously turning into bugs around him. The world itself seems very, very normal. Very, very ordinary. And everybody in the world continues to have normal, ordinary concerns. So whereas in the Gilman text, we have a slow loss of narrative frame, a loss of narrative structure and things very gradually getting weirder and weirder, a weirder, especially with this wallpaper. In the Kafka test, the weird just hits you right at the start. There it is. He's a giant bug, first page, right there. So the Gilman kind of eases you into the weirdness and the Kafka doesn't. Here's another way in which they're a bit different. The Gilman still ends up with this kind of odd loss of narrative frame and a roting sense of self. And the Kafka text, I wanna argue, actually doesn't do that either. Metamorphosis, I don't think, ever fully loses its narrative frame. And this is partially because it's a third person narrative. But while the frame doesn't get lost, it does shift because we have a tight third person narrative centered on Gregor. And what happens to Gregor? You can ruin the ending because you're all reddit already. What happens to Gregor? He dies. It's pretty hard to have a tight third person narrative on a dead narrator. I mean, if any of you are in a creative writing class, they usually caution you against doing that, right? Because it's weird. So what happens here is that the narrative shifts from Gregor to other members of his family. So the frame isn't lost entirely. It doesn't start fracturing and making no sense, but it does have to make this jump in order to continue. And we know from Kafka's own notes and journals that he was never fully satisfied with the end of metamorphosis. So you can think about that. So before I get into the setting and the family and all those other things, I propose that we take like a 10 minute break. Sound good? So we just stated the obvious that Gregor turns into some kind of bug. That's where we left off before the break. But now I'm gonna pick up by again looking at the setting. So I'm gonna leave his change aside for a moment and instead look at this apartment that he lives in, which maybe looks something like this. I'm not the greatest at spatial awareness, so I might've gotten this wrong, but this is generally how I think it looks, some kind of organization like this. I've marked doors with keys because there are doors and locks and locks feature pretty strongly in this text, people getting locked out or locked in. In fact, the narrative starts with Gregor locking everyone else out and locking himself in the room, which means nobody can actually come in and see what's befallen him because they can't get in until he turns the lock with his mouth, if you remember that. And then about halfway through the text, he's been locked in. All the keys have been moved to the outside of the doors and he's confined in his room by the rest of the family. But there are a lot of doors in Gregor's room, if you notice this. His room has a lot of, it's a weird room. I don't know, my room doesn't have this many doors. So he's got doors on all sides of his room except for one that has a window. Every door he can go out of leads him into another space with other people. He's got his mother and father on one side of him, his sister on the other side of him, a living room which eventually gets locked, oh no, his sister eventually lives in the living room because the lodgers are in her room, so there's a living room. And then presumably some kind of kitchen or stairs, but Gregor never goes into those spaces so I haven't really put much detail on them. But if you'll notice, Gregor is literally hemmed in on all sides by not just other rooms, but other people. And at a point, literally locked in on all sides by other people. So Jean-Paul Sartre has this great quotation, hell is other people, I like it. Maybe I've worked too much service. Anyway, so there's a way in which that seems to be represented here that Gregor is penned in by other people, not just his perspective, so we know that our narrator in the Yellow Wallpaper, her perspective is hemmed in by John to some degree, but Gregor is physically hemmed in by other people. In Gregor's room, I'll come to that quotation that's half blocked in a minute, so don't worry that you can't read all of that. In Gregor's room, we're only really told about one decoration. We aren't told that much about the furniture in his room. We're told that the wallpaper is flowered, but apparently it's not nearly as interesting as the wallpaper in the Gilman narrative. But we are told about this one decoration. There hun, there hun the picture. He had recently cut out from an illustrated magazine and mounted in a pretty gilded frame. It showed a lady posed sitting erect, attired in a fur hat and a fur boa and raising a heavy firm must, must, which swallowed her right arm up to the elbow towards the viewer. Now, obviously this is not the same picture because she's not sitting down for starters, but it's kind of similar, so I put it up there anyway. This is really interesting. This picture features a lot in this narrative. It's the only thing we're told about with any detail in Gregor's room. Also, when Gregor's boss comes over to see why he hasn't shown up from work, Gregor's mother says, oh, he'll open the door in a minute and then you'll see this picture and you'll see how lovingly he framed it and how beautiful it is. Later on in the text, Gregor actually tries to save the picture. So when his mother and his sister are removing things from Gregor's room, he crawled up to the picture hurriedly and pressed his stomach against the glass, which held him fast and did his burning stomach good. So he blocks the picture with his body so that his mother and his sister can't remove it from his room. And when he does this, he's on the wall pressed up against this picture with his weird bug-like body. And we're told that his sister moved aside and cut sight of the monstrous brown patch on the flowered wallpaper. And before it actually dawned on her that what she was looking at was Gregor, she gave a horse scream. I threw this in here because it's really kind of interesting and cool for me since we have these two texts side by side, that Gregor actually gets mistaken for wallpaper. He's just like a monstrous brown smear on the wallpaper. Oh, no wait, that's my brother. So there's a way in which Gregor and our narrator in the yellow wallpaper both kind of pushed themselves into the wallpaper at different points in the text, which I think is very interesting. But this picture, Gregor seems to have a huge attachment to this picture. And that might seem kind of curious because this isn't a picture of anyone he knows, it's just a picture from a magazine. He's cut it out and he has lovingly framed it on purpose and mounted it on the wall. And it's the one thing he goes to try and save when they're removing things from his room. So while you may suspect as you read through this text that Gregor doesn't actually have a lot of interaction with the members of his family prior to becoming a bug, he doesn't necessarily seem to know a lot about what's going on in their lives. They don't seem to know a lot about him. He references some kind of fleeting awkward encounters with women in his travels and you can read about those. But the thing he seems to have the most attachment to is this picture of this woman that he doesn't even know. So you might think Gregor's missing a lot of contact here. He doesn't really seem to have a lot of friends. He doesn't seem to have a girlfriend. He doesn't really get along with his family. Again, as in with our narrator in the yellow wallpaper, Gregor seems to be a character that doesn't speak to anyone else. No one else really knows what's going on. And this seems to be true prior to him turning into a bug such that the most important thing to him is this picture of a stranger. So that's a little bit about the setting. But in talking about the setting, I've already talked about the family because we know that the family is hemming Gregor in, literally, physically in the apartment in which they all live. So the family is largely unnamed. They're called the mother, the father, the sister. The sister is sometimes referred to by a name. Her name is Gret. But often, she's just called the sister or his sister. And this is interesting as well because our narrator in the yellow wallpaper is also unnamed. John is given a name and John's sister is given a name but the narrator doesn't have a name. Why wouldn't these characters have names? Or when they have names, why aren't their names used? I have my own suspicion that perhaps it's because they're standing in for something more generic. But what do you guys think? Any ideas? But she doesn't refer to it most of the time. I thought, yeah, I think Jane is the sister. I took Jenny as a, well, anyway. Why would they be unnamed or largely unnamed? Yeah, any other thoughts? Nice. So he doesn't really need to use a name because they don't really have robust perspectives from his point of view. Cool. At the start of this story, we have Gregor talking about the family dynamic and he says, what a quiet life the family leads anyway, said Gregor to himself. And as he stared ahead in the dark, he felt very proud that he had been able to provide his parents and his sister with such a life in such a fine apartment. This is in the early days of his transformation when he gets to stay at home and observe the way in which his family lives in a day to day existence. And so it seems to him that he's done pretty well. And at this point, it seems that for Gregor, the fact that he's able to provide for his family matters a lot in terms of his sense of self-worth and who he is. And he takes pride in being able to provide this apartment for them. So we know that at this point, none of them really work. They don't do anything. Gregor provides all the money and he takes care of them. There's a reference that at some point his father did work or anyway, his father is in massive debt somehow and the nature of the debt is something interesting that you can talk about. This father is in debt and that Gregor is working to pay off this debt. But towards the end of the narrative, much like our narrator in the Yellow Wallpaper's perspective shifts with regards to John, towards the end of the narrative, it seems that Gregor's perspective towards his family also shifts. He was hardly surprised that he had shown so little consideration for the others of late. In the past, this consideration had been his pride. So as the text progresses, Gregor seems to care less about his family and about his family's well-being. And in fact, as we'll see, he starts getting annoyed and enraged with members of his family for things that they do. So let's look at the family members in a little bit more detail. First, Gregor's father. Gregor's father has the distinction of forcing Gregor back into his room twice in this text. The first time he does it, his father, impeccably his father forced him back, hissing like a savage. There's something kind of primal and animalistic about Gregor's father. He has this power, which is interesting. But how is he described? About halfway through the text, Gregor's father has gone back to work and a huge change comes over his father. But now he stood firm and erect, dressed in a tight blue uniform with gold buttons of the sort worn by the servants in a bank. His powerful double chin unrolled above the stiff high collar of his coat. His black eyes looked out clear and sharp from beneath his bushy eyebrows. His white hair once disheveled was combed down in a shining meticulous straight part. His father here seems very ordered, very put together. In fact, he's in a uniform, which is itself a symbol of authority. His hair is combed, everything is shining, everything is erect and straight and orderly. So there seems to be a bit of a parallel here between Gregor's father as an authority figure and John as an authority figure. John pulls his authority from being a doctor from claiming to be objective, whereas Gregor's father seems to pull his authority from being this kind of uniformed enforcer. It's much more powerful, much more violent type of form of, I mean in terms of physically violent type of authority, but it is again another way of laying down authority and setting what is the normal. Finally, there's this really interesting scene where the father starts pelting Gregor with apples. So I have a friend that absolutely finds this part hilarious. I guess this is the ways in which reading this text can differ, I never found this that funny, but I know people do find this hilarious that the father's pelting Gregor with apples and stomping his feet like he's gonna crush his son. Just kind of weird, because you've gotta imagine Gregor's a pretty big bug. Probably can't be crushed by shoes, but anyway. Okay, so the apple. The apple literally penetrated Gregor's back. Gregor tried to drag himself on further as if the surprising, unbelievable pain would pass with a change of place, but he felt as if he were nailed fast and collapsed in a total confusion of all his senses. There is a kind of genesis inspired biblical interpretation that can be given of this passage, in particular with reference to the apple and the dynamic between the father and the son. I won't be doing that here, but I want you to know that that is a possibility and that the apple itself has figured a lot in terms of how to understand what's going on in this text. Instead though, I wanna look at the phrase nailed fast and total confusion of his senses, because that reminds me of something else. I lie here on this great immovable bed, it is nailed down I believe and follow the pattern about by the hour. There's a way in which Gregor's father literally pondmills him until he feels nailed fast. There's a rigidity in this scene with the apple as Gregor's father forces him back into the room, that Gregor's father is not going to give way to Gregor's perspective, instead Gregor has to give way to his father's. The same thing we saw happening in the yellow wallpaper where the narrator has to give way to John's perspective. So I claim that the father denies Gregor's perspective and forces Gregor back into his room at least twice. What about the mother? Arguably one of the more compassionate members of the family. What is her relationship with Gregor? We don't actually hear a lot about the mother, she's there quite often, but she doesn't take on a big role until it comes time for the mother and sister to move all the furniture out of Gregor's house or Gregor's room. So if you remember, they decide, the sister decides that perhaps things would be easier for Gregor if all the furniture was out of his room and then he could climb on all the walls in the ceiling as much as he wants to. So, as they're moving things out of the room, the mother starts having second thoughts. It really weighed upon her heart to see the empty wall and why shouldn't Gregor also have the same feeling when he had been used to this furniture for so long and would feel abandoned in an empty room. So the mother starts feeling that what they're doing isn't right. That the way in which they're pulling everything out of the room is going to, instead of allowing Gregor to read them, make him feel abandoned as though they'd given up any hope of him turning back into a human being or recovering from his illness at all. What kind of effect does this have on Gregor? As he listened to the words of his mother, Gregor came to see that in the course of two months, lack of any direct human attention combined with the monotonous life which within the family must have confused his mind. For there is no other way he could explain how he could have seriously desired his room emptied. So if you remember, Gregor was actually looking forward to having everything taken out of his room. He wanted all that stuff out of his room so that he could run all over the place. But when his mother starts worrying that taking everything out of the room will send the message that they've given up on him, Gregor changes his mind and decides that he doesn't want everything removed. So his mother through her compassion or through her pity thinks that Gregor must react the same way she does. And Gregor in hearing this actually does react the same way she does. So she assumes a shared perspective and in doing so, she actually makes that shared perspective a reality that Gregor decides he doesn't want the stuff removed from his room. Again, she isn't trying to see things from Gregor's perspective, but at least she is extending some kind of compassion towards Gregor and thinking about how would I feel if I were Gregor? Which may not be exactly the same as how would Gregor feel? So there's a way in which the mother too ends up not really acknowledging Gregor's perspective. Though in a very different way from the way in which the father doesn't acknowledge Gregor's perspective. What about the sister or Gretz? She spends most of the time with Gregor, right? She's the one who takes over the sole responsibility of caring for Gregor, of providing him food. And so arguably they have the most interaction with each other. And yet, it is the sister who denies not only his perspective, but Gregor's humanity. Near the end of the text, it has to go, cried the sister. If it were Gregor, he would have understood long ago that it is not possible for human beings to live with a beast like that. And he would have left of his own free will. Whatever that is, it's not Gregor anymore. It's just a beast and it has to go. So not only does Gretz deny his perspective, she actually denies his humanity. She says all he is is an animal. And since he's an animal, we don't owe him anything anymore. And we just have to get rid of him. So that's the way in which I think the family dynamic pans out in this. But what you'll notice, of course, is that throughout the family dynamic, there hasn't been a whole lot of communication happening between different members of the family, particularly between the family and Gregor. And it seems that that might have been the case even before this metamorphosis happened, but it especially is the case after the metamorphosis. In fact, in one of the sentences that I find to be the most sad in this text, so when I read this text, I find it to be very sad. In one of the sentences I find to be the most sad, as he couldn't be understood, no one, not even his sister, even dreamed that he was able to understand others. So at the very start of the text, Gregor is able to speak, but quite quickly that ability to speak disappears. And all he is able to do is kind of hiss and nobody knows what he's saying. And eventually he even stops doing that. He stops hissing, he stops attempting to communicate at least through words, through sounds. And so he doesn't speak. And because he doesn't speak because nobody understands him, they assume that that is vice versa. So they take their perspective as the normal perspective and they assume that the way they're experiencing this interaction between themselves and Gregor is also the way he is experiencing it. And so they assume that he doesn't understand them as well, which is why when his sister enters the room, she will sigh and complain about having to clean things up, why the family discusses their options about what to do with him right in front of him without really concerning themselves about whether he understands all sorts of things happen in and around Gregor or around Gregor in his room that assumes that he doesn't know what they're talking about. In fact, there seems to be only one time when someone addresses Gregor directly. And here it is. Gregor, his sister calls, raising her fist with a compelling look. These were the first words she had spoken to him since his transformation. Not only are they the first, I think they're from the last words that she speaks to him. This is when Gregor has scuttled onto the wall and is pressing himself against that portrait, trying to save it from his mother and sister so that they don't take it out of the room. And his sister shakes her fist at him and tries to frighten him off the wall. That's the only time someone actually addresses Gregor directly after they see the change. After the doors are unlocked and they see what's happened, that's the only time anyone actually tries to communicate with him. And it's not really a communication so much as it is a threat. Something you might yell at an animal to try and scare them. So I think that what happens with Gregor's family is very similar to what happens between John and the narrator. But John's perspective denies the reality of our narrator's experience because he claims to see everything. The family doesn't so much deny the reality of Gregor's experience, it doesn't even occur to them that there is an experience to be denied there. They assume that because he looks different somehow or has undergone some kind of change, that change is always a little bit vague, that therefore there is no experience at all. And so they don't even have to bother denying it. In some ways it's actually worse than what's happening in the LOL paper. Which brings us, of course, to the change. Now the text is really vague about what happens here. Apparently people have spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly what kind of bug Gregor turns into. And it's really unclear. And you can read a little bit of this in the introduction to your text. In fact, Kafka wanted it to be unclear on purpose. He said there was never to be a picture of the vermin or the insect or the bug, however you wanna talk about it, that Gregor turns into anywhere in any of the texts because it's supposed to be really unclear what's happened. And one reading of the text is to say, really he hasn't changed physically at all. It's a mental change. That's a fun possible way of cashing out the text. I like to think about it as a giant, that he's turned into a giant bug, because it amuses me, but anyway. There are different ways of reading this text. Whatever the change is, it's a vague change, it's not described. And it's a change that the family has to grapple with. But what's true is that there are actually multiple changes that happen throughout this text. So it isn't just that Gregor physically changes, which he seems to do somehow, even if his physical change is only a change in appetite, that he stops liking certain foods and starts liking others and is unable to communicate and those kind of things. He also seems to mentally transform. His attitudes change, his personality slowly changes. In fact, the whole family undergoes a transformation. And that's something I don't have time to talk about every detail of the individual members of the family and how they change. But it is true that his father, his mother and his sister undergo a change throughout this whole process of the narrative, which you can watch for. So the physical change. Yeah, so physically it seems that something transforms with Gregor and now he's able to climb on the walls and hang from the ceiling. I really like that image, feeling light and airy with his sticky little multiple legs hanging onto the ceiling. And by the end, not only has his body somehow transformed if you take that interpretation, but in addition, it continues to change. So his body at first is really, really plump and he falls out of bed and bounces, if you remember. But by the end of the text, we're told Gregor's body was completely flat and dry. It was only now that they actually perceived it when he was no longer supported by his little legs. So there's a way in which the body itself starts flattening out and drying up throughout the course of this narrative. So physically he definitely undergoes a change. But there's also a change in his attitude. So just as with our narrator with John, Gregor seems that he might be a bit of an unreliable narrator. He tells you things that don't seem that they could possibly be true. So he believes that his family locks him in his room out of kindness. This happens early on in the text. They put food in there for him to eat and then they all leave and they move the locks to the outside and they lock the doors. And he thinks, oh, that's nice. That way I know I won't be disturbed while I'm eating. Really? They locked you in your room with food. You know what else would guarantee that you wouldn't be disturbed while you were eating if the locks were still on the inside. So he thinks that that's a kindness that they've locked him in. Later on, I've already gone over the fact that Gregor is working to pay off some kind of mysterious, again, vague, unnamed debt that his father is in. And so he's been working and he comes home every day and gives his family his pay and his family out of that pays the rent and gets the food and the things they need for living and are also supposed to be paying down the debt. But we learn after Gregor's transformation that his father has actually been squirreling away some of the money and hasn't been using it to pay off the debt. You'd think that might kind of annoy Gregor. But instead he says that he sees the wisdom in his father saving up the money because now they can deal with this horrible transformation that's happened. So he claims to be happy that his father saved a bunch of money instead of paying down the debt. That might seem kind of odd. Really? Really is he happy? He believes his sister is grateful to him for hiding under the sofa and he'll say things like he could see an expression of gratitude on her face for the little things he tries to do to make looking after him better. And yet we know that his family doesn't seem to think that Gregor can communicate with them at all. So there's a way in which they're talking around him and they're not acknowledging his perspective and yet he imagines that he can see acknowledgement in his sister's face. But then he breaks out. I love this part. Let's go to page 55. This is when the women are trying to move things out of the room to give him space to climb on the walls. And so he broke out. The women were just leaning against the bureau in the next room catching their breath. He changed directions four times as he ran. He really had no idea what to rest you first. When hanging on the wall, which was otherwise bare, he was struck by the picture of the lady dressed in nothing but fur. He crawled up to it hurriedly and pressed himself against the glass. I just love the image of him like scuttling around on the floor. Oh my God, what do I see? What do I see? So he breaks out. And after this, this seems to be the first time that Gregor really tries to do something active and tries to make his wishes known to his family. And after this, things change. But afterwards, he was not at all in the mood to worry about his family. He was simply full of rage at how badly they treated him. So he becomes less concerned with his family and if you remember from earlier, his family had been his pride. Being able to take care of his family was a defining feature of how he thought of himself and how he measured his success. But later, he seems to not care. And then, his sister plays the violin. She plays it for the lodger staying in her room while she's sleeping in the living room. And Gregor is compelled to scuttle out into the living room to hear the music from the lodgers or that she's playing for the lodger. This is a really interesting scene because up until now Gregor has usually tried to hide himself from his family and from other people so that nobody really has to deal with him. He'll scuttle under the sofa. He's pulled a sheet onto the sofa to help really hide himself. But as she's playing the music, he is compelled to leave his room and come out into the living room to listen. Not only that, but he describes his body now as really, really grim. So he's got kind of dust bunnies and stuff all over him at this point and he's dragging a bunch of dirt and he hasn't bothered to clean himself and he scuttles out into the living room and you can kind of imagine him scuttling in this cloud of dirt and dust and hair and stuff. And he sits there listening to the music and he says, was he a beast that music should move him like this? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he'd longed for was being revealed. So at this point Gregor isn't finding any joy in eating food at all and yet his soul seems to be being fed by the music. Was he a beast? This takes us back to Michelle Foucault's history of madness. The day would come when this animal presence in madness would be considered from an evolutionary perspective as a sign or even the essence of sickness. Madness here took its face from the mask of the beast. So though Gregor undergoes what seems to be a physical transformation whereas the narrator in the yellow wallpaper undergoes what does not seem to be a physical transformation there's a way in which the two of them can be related if we remember that for the 19th century madness and animality were close together. Being mad and being an animal were seen as similar things. A loss of humanity and both texts seem to represent a main character that is undergoing some kind of loss of humanity from the perspective of the people around them in the text. So I claim there is this connection between the illness represented in the yellow wallpaper and the metamorphosis represented in the metamorphosis. Okay, that was a bit redundant, but go with me here. So the illness is represented as the narrator losing control of this animal part of herself, emotional. This is how the 19th century would have understood it whereas Gregor literally turns into an animal. Not only that, but I draw your attention to how Gregor's body looks at the end of this narrative. Completely flat and dry, like paper, like wallpaper. Okay, that might be a stretch, but it definitely seems to be an empty shell and it is empty because at this point Gregor has died. And that might remind us of something. So if we go back to Nietzsche, remember, Nietzsche wanted us to kind of let our animal sides out. But when Nietzsche talked about the animal within us, he refers to the lion or the blonde beast, not an insect. So that's kind of interesting that the animal presence inside of Gregor is not a lion or a blonde beast, but a bug. As we are compelled to be more and more human and fit in more and more with this morality of pity, holding us back from our perhaps more noble morality of unreflectiveness, Nietzsche tells us that we aren't able to act on our instincts. And so he says, all instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward. The entire inner world, originally as thin as if it were stretched between two membranes, expanded and extended itself. Here at the end of Metamorphosis, I think we have the reverse. We have a narrative where Gregor starts out really, really plump in body. He's bouncing, he's big, and slowly he thins. He thins down until he is flat and dry and empty. And there is no subjective perspective at all left by that point. There's nothing left. He dies. So it's kind of the opposite of this Nietzschean story. So the result, I don't know what that was. Did everybody hear that? Yeah. Okay. Oh, it's next door. Thank you. It's a bug. Scuttling on the walls next door. Okay. So the result. At the end of the LOL paper, we have a narrative that starts fracturing and falling apart, a narrator that is unable to think straight, and a narrator that multiplies into multiple kind of creeping women all over the place. At the end of the Metamorphosis, we don't have that happen. Instead, the narrator's perspective just disappears. Becomes flatter and thinner and drier until there's nothing left at all. And so a type of normality or a norm is reestablished, but only with the shifting of the text. So the text shifts from a tight third person on Gregor to this more omniscient perspective where we're looking at the Char women and Gregor's family members, and they decide they're gonna blow off work and go for a ride in the country and have a picnic. And the narrative just continues. But now it continues without Gregor. We've had to shift. So when we're looking at the relationship between the norm, illness, morality, and animality, it seems that, as I said, illness is determined in response to whatever has been set up as the norm around these people, that there is something morally required in getting rid of this illness, and that especially in the case of Metamorphosis, there's a parallel between being an animal and being mad. In this reduction to animality, madness found its truth and its care. When the mad man became a beast, the animal presence in him removed the scandal of madness, not because the beast had been silenced, but because all humanity had been evacuated. And this is what Gret tries to do with regards to Gregor. By denying his humanity, she has allowed the family to relinquish any obligation they might feel to taking care of him. If it's not Gregor, if it's not human, then they don't have to take care of it anymore. This relationship between madness and animality is really interesting in terms of responsibility and moral obligation. In the yellow wallpaper, the narrator breaks out. She says she's gotten out of the wallpaper and she's creeping along the wall and no one can put her back in, but she does so it seems, partially at the expense of others' perspectives. So she breaks out, John enters the room and he faints, if you remember. Now she has to creep over him. That was really inconsiderate of him to faint right across her path. So he faints and she says, now why should the man have fainted? But he did and right across my path by the wall. John is still there, his perspective is still there, but it is dormant and in its dormancy, the narrator gets to continue. But this end doesn't feel like a resolved ending. You know that John is going to regain consciousness. His perspective and his authority will come back and the struggle will continue again. The narrator has broken out, but the breakout is only temporary. Whereas, when it comes to the metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa breaks out. He breaks out of the room twice, once actually using the phrase and so he broke out. But he is never able to stay out. Instead, he's driven back into his room repeatedly and he eventually becomes a beast and loses his perspective. It gets thinner and drier until there's nothing left and his voice is silenced with his death. And so we have a shift from the third person narrative. In fact, one of the last things that is referred directly to Gregor is to his body and it's said by the charwoman or the cleaning woman. Come and see, it's snuffed it. It's lying there snuffed it completely. Not him, just it. It's gone, there's no more Gregor. So normality is restored in this text, but at the expense of shifting our perspective and losing our narrator, Gregor is gone. So I claim that both these texts actually represent monsters as silenced voices. And so far as the 19th century would have viewed Gregor and the narrator in the yellow wallpaper as monsters, they silenced their voices. These people are not able to speak. And so instead, the texts allow these individuals to speak to you, the reader. Because they cannot speak to the people around them. To do so, to break out and to speak is to destabilize the narrative. So both texts allow the monsters to speak, but only in an isolated way. And eventually it seems that they have to be silenced again in order to reestablish the narrative. So what I think is really interesting is that both texts seem to illustrate the lengths to which people will go to silence these non-normative voices in an effort to preserve what is considered to be normal. So it seems that both texts represent that it is preferable, or could be considered preferable, to have a wife upstairs creeping around the walls, tearing at wallpaper, or a brother who's a giant bug locked away in a room. Then to have voices that speak that aren't part of the norm. So we'd rather have the appearance of normality and have these people locked away. And this is what the 19th century largely did when it came to mental illness, was lock it away. We have this relationship between the norm, illness, morality, and animality represented in these texts through for the first time an appearance of the monster speaking. Now as I've said, Gilman and Kafka came out these texts in two different directions, but I think the texts have a lot in common. And one thing that they have in common is allowing us to explore the way in which 19th century anchored monstrosity in mental illness such that monstrosity came to be understood as a medicalized scientific thing that could be studied as opposed to something demonic or satanic. So Satan has dropped out here and instead we have authority figures of the doctors and authority figures in terms of police officers or security in general that are kind of establishing what is considered normal and what is non-monsterous because it deviates from the norm. And of course the last question that's still hanging around here is are these narrators really the monsters? And that's something I'm gonna leave you guys to talk about. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.