The Yellow Wallpaper and A Jury of Her Peers

      The Yellow Wallpaper was an interesting short story wrote in a stream of conciousness narration.  This type of narration was new to me and I definitely enjoyed getting an inside peak at the characters thoughts and emotions.  The character is suffering from a kind of post partum depression and is prescribed a rest cure from her doctor which is her husband.  She is prohibited from doing most intellectual stimulation and is confined to a nursery with wallpaper in which she thinks a woman lives inside of.  The narrator of the story is unreliable though so it is hard to be sure if what she tells is what actually occurs. In all though the psychological aspect of the story was rather intriguing.
     A Jury of Her Peers was a unique story that put the reader in the driver seat of an investigation involving a murder.  The story presented the reader with the clues and let the reader decipher them and form there own opinion, until the end when the true workings of the death are revealed.  This makes this novel very psychologically engaging. In the story there are two juries, one of men and one of women. Her peers in the novel are the women, they understand where she is coming from and help back her up when the men make harsh comments. In all I enjoyed playing the role of detective in the novel and thought it was an interesting story.

“A Goodman is Hard to Find” and "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been"

     In this weeks readings, there was a large amount of drama and suspense.  The books were enticing to me because they seemed like something you would watch in a movie.  In the stories, the drama would build up out of nowhere leaving the reader amidst a large amount of suspense and then finally a totally unexpected ending. 
     In "A Goodman is Hard to Find," I totally did not expect for the whole family to be killed like that. The author did foreshadow it though when she pointed out the fact that she wore a nice dress incase the family got in a car accident and she died.  In "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," I definitely did not expect Arnold Fiend to be an old creepy man dressed in a mask, in order to trick Connie into coming with him.
     In all I enjoyed the short stories for their unique plots that keep the reader on the edge of their seat.

A Rose for Emily and the Old Gardiston

A Rose for Emily was about a girl and the trouble she had with letting individuals that had passed away actually rest in peace.  The tone of the story is relatively dark and the author adds on to this with the ending when it is revealed that Emily had been keeping her lover's dead body upstairs in her house. This was definitely an unexpected ending to the novel. Another interesting aspect was the story was read from the perspective of the town which was a new aspect im not accustomed to. The novel as a whole was an easy read and relatively short which I definitely enjoyed. In all, the story was rather intriguing and I enjoyed reading it.
The Old Gardiston is a story set during the civil war and shows the hatred that was present between the north and the south. The marriage of Gardis and Captain Newell at the end of the story represents the reunifying of the north and south into one country. Also at the end of the story personification is shown when the house starts talking about Gardis. The story is an interesting interpretation of the struggles during the civil war and I definitely enjoyed reading this short novel.

Behind a Mask (Part II), The Goopherded Grapevine, The Sherrif’s Children, & Jean-ah Poquelin

     Behind a Mask far exceeded my expectations of the novel prior to reading it. The author chose a much different ending then I would of generally expected. In most novels you expect the plot of the "antagonist" to be revealed and justice be served, in this case though, Jean got what she desired by getting married.  She manipulated people throughout the whole novel to do exactly what she wanted. This was effective in part because of the "mask" that hid her true identity.  The author L.M. Alcott wrote under another name so she would not be held responsible for her liberal views of women. This hiding of identity is the central theme of the novel and helps add to the compelling nature of the story. In all I really enjoyed this book, a lot more then I expected.
     As for the Southern Gothic short stories, The Goopherded Grapevine, The Sherrif's Children, & Jean-ah Poquelin, all made for a unique writing style, unlike any I have ever read.  The only thing I didn't like about them was the hard to understand Southern dialect used , especially in Jean-ah Poquelin. The stories included traditional gothic settings such as swamps and old plantation homes. The plots included spookie elements such as curses, sick kin, and illegitimate sons. The stories portrayed aspects of our nations history through these southern gothic novels.