/ssrg/ Short Story Reading Group: The Yellow Wall Paper

>>8975646
It's following the book. You can check the table of contents on the bookdepository link, or download the epub in the mega folder.

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Why is this group not doing better? Poorly choice of stories? I really liked Bartleby, Death of Ivan Ilyich, and The Man Who Would Be King. A lot of people seemed to like Bartleby at least.

Was it because Death of Ivan Ilyich was too long? Did that kill the group?

Is it because people don't feel committed to the group, whereas with the W&P/COMC everyone feels like they are part of the group?

Are short stories just not /lit/ reading group material?

Is there anything I can do to improve the group?

I wasn't very sure where this story was going at first. I was convinced that it was going to turn out as some sort of Lovecraftian horror where the protagonist gets sucked into the wallpaper with all the other "women" who were trapped inside. But it was clear what the story was about by the end.

I feel that Gilman was going for a satire of subservient women, while attacking the methods physicians used to cure depression (?). This was mainly achieved through excessive use of exclamation marks, very short paragraphs and the character's submissive nature to her husband despite being tormented by her solitude.

Confined in the nursery and restricted from writing or any activity, the depressed protagonist turns to her imagination to entertain herself. Eventually this causes her mental health to deteriorate even further and causes her spiral into madness.

From Wikipedia:

>Gilman explained that the idea for the story originated in her own experience as a patient: "the real purpose of the story was to reach Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his ways".[7] She had suffered years of depression and consulted a well-known specialist physician who prescribed a "rest cure" which required her to "live as domestic a life as possible". She was forbidden to touch pen, pencil, or brush, and was allowed only two hours of mental stimulation a day.

I prefer to view it as not so much an attack on 'the patriarchy' as an attack on shitty physicians like the protagonist's husband. Anyone can attest that a lack of mental stimulation causes the mind to wander in its boredom.

>>8975998
Bad timezone, I think.

I suggest skipping the next story. I read ahead and it might be one of the worst short stories I've ever read. About half of it is exposition, the characters are written ridiculously and the ending is complete nonsense.

>>8975998
Reading groups don't work on /lit/
I've seen all of them fizzle out. Count and War will go eventually. The board is for shitposting, not discussion.

>reading feminist crap

>>8976111

I was thinking towards the end that she was just going to off herself. Maybe it was purposely written to look like that?

Did her husband and the other woman also actually ever regard the wallpaper like she says? Or is that just her imagination/early madness?

>>8976121
The count is nearly over and we managed to at least drag a few people through it.

>>8975998
I think it is a case of 'Post it and they will come'
Just got to make it accessible to jump in at any time, which I think you have done a good job of, what with all the links for ebooks and stuff. Make sure to ignore the polls and just focus on number of posters in the thread.

>>8976253
It was purposely written to give it the atmosphere of a horror story. And masterfully done too. My heart was fucking pounding at the end.

Yeah, it's definitely her imagination. At the end her sister in law says that she'll clean the room for her or something and the protagonist thinks that she's trying to trick her into leaving the room so that the sister in law would be able to scrape the wallpaper herself. At that point it's clear that she's gone completely bonkers.

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>Open the book while out today
>Can't remember what story we are reading
>Remember it is written by a woman
>Read the one by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
>Turns out it's a man
>MARIA

alright, reading the yellow wallpaper now.

Is reading short stories a good way to discover authors whose full novels I will enjoy? I've have read lots of books but almost entirely one book for each author. I haven't found that one writer whose works I want to own in their entirety.

>>8975998
Thanks for the effort anon

>>8976478
It can be but it depends on the author.

>>8976185
This, t b h.

>>8975998
I actually like /ssrg/ and I follow the thread, it is just I don't involve in discussions. I read The Necklace, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and The Man Who Would Be King - thanks for recommendations.

It is a well-written story.
In a concise manner it showed the situation of women position in marriage as well as the state of medicine and phychology in XIX century.
While reading you can actually see how her mind deteriorates and she is getting more and more mad. She unknowingly makes the story more sombre and by the end I was genuinely creeped out.
Not only the fact that we read it as a diary of a mad women makes it spooky, the imagery is uncomfortable from the begining: disgusting shade of yellow, wallpaper with holes and pinned down bed forshadows the fall of the heroine.

This group is dead because you stuck to that stupid fucking collection of stories instead of choosing your own. Good job making the first failed reading group of 2017.

>>8980130
Thank you for the input. I stuck to the book because people in the discussion thread wanted to use that book and wanted to stick to it because it'd remove any question of what came next. No one has really complained about the direction of the stories except one troll who keeps saying 3 out of 20 stories being female is pushing a feminist agenda, a few agreed The Necklace wasn't very good, and a person in this thread said the next story should probably be skipped.

I was the guy in the discussion thread recommending the 100 Greatest Stories book, so the one we ended up using is not even the one I recommended. We went with this because people said it was already decided and I think a few had already purchased it.

I would be open to moving the group away from the book. I don't even own it so I'm not tied to it. I do feel bad for anons who bought it, but we will return to it for at least half the later stories because they're good (Borges, Joyce, and Kafka for sure).

I am open to recommendations for the next story.

For reference, the rest of the book's stories:
The Fortune-Teller (1896, Machado de Assis)
The Lady with the Toy Dog (1899, Chekhov)
How Old Timofei Died with a Song (1900, Rilke)
The Path to the Cemetery (1901, Mann)
The Prussian Officer (1914, D.H. Lawrence)
Araby (1914, Joyce)
Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, Her Son-in-Law (1917, Pirandello)
The Mark on the Wall (1921, Woolf)
A Hunger Artist (1922, Kafka)
The Garden-Party (1922, Mansfield)
The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket (1924, Kawabata)
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place (1926, Hemingway)
The Sacrifical Egg (1959, Achebe)
A & P (1961, Updike)
Borges and I (1962, Borges)

>Good job making the first failed reading group of 2017.

I am OP of both the first failed group of 2017 and the first successful one.

One guy asked for The Pedersen Kid by William H. Gass

Without any other input, Araby will be the next story because it seems like one /lit/ will be most interested in.

The real question, and it's totally serious, is whether the color, shape, and gradual changes to the yellow wallpaper are because they are stains from her pissing on the walls.

Consider how your scrutiny of the narrator's reliability and level of mental illness changes if you hold for a moment that could be true.

She thinks about how great it would be to jump and she hangs herself at the end. The husband sees it and faints because she is trapped in death just like in life, it is her shadow crawling over him that is her only reality now. The narrative voice continues because there is no escape from that nightmare, not even death.