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Don’t forget the part where the wallpaper contains arsenic.
Not only is Shadows From The Walls of Death the most metal name I’ve ever heard for a book:
“The book itself contains a dangerous concentration of arsenic compounds. The successful campaign against arsenical wallpapers urged by the book, along with the dangerous amount of the poison contained in the volume has led to the destruction of the vast majority of its original print run.”
“so, this book will contain drawings of things that kill you?”
“No”
“Descriptions of things that kill you?”
“No”
“Well, then how are you going to teach people about the things that kill them”
“Ahhh, well, I’ve got a novel method!”
I’m also sickly and frail, I’m the perfect Victorian love interest
Oh, how salacious! Next you’re going to tell us you have some scintillating photographs of your ankles stored someplace, perhaps?
With curious interest,
- D.W.C.
Same. Tho perhaps too much. I don’t have the fine motor control to write letters.
Damn I wish I could lay in bed for extended periods of time
A finger on the monkey’s paw curls…
Tbf, it wouldn’t surprise me if TB (aka consumption) made a massive return. It’s been long enough for people to have forgotten its devastation, and not learning anything from history because people be dumb.
I think thats just called Laudanum summer
Traumatizing middle school reading assignment
That does seem a bit young for that. Did it make sense to you at that age?
Depends on what “makes sense” meant. I understood that the dude basically locked up his wife and she went insane, crawling around the room thinking her shadow was another woman in the wallpaper. Also that she perhaps killed her husband in the end.
I also caught the vague impression maybe they lost a kid since she mentions shes in “the nursery.” Of course bars on the window makes it seem like maybe shes in a hospital, but that wouldn’t track with her having a blade to sharpen her pencil with.
I still don’t really know what the message is. People are fucked up? Mental illness was not well understood nor treated well in the victorian era? People can go insane because they’re treated like they’re insane?
Addendum: Just read the wiki article. Yeah the feminist themes were almost entirely lost on us. To be fair I grew up in a very rural conservative town, but that raises the question of why have us read the book if not to talk about the main point? I think we were just supposed to pick out metaphors and similes etc. from the text
We read that story specifically for the feminist themes in our school in germany, as they were a necessary topic in the curriculum. The topic was called feminist short stories and also included a story called “weekend” and “story of an hour”, which were both quite interesting, especially for their time
Doncha gotta have it to lose it?
Can’t lose a thing you never had.
Looks like somebody’s discovered Buddhism
