Wharton and Gilman

Wharton's "The Other Two" is a very thought-provoking short story about intimacy and the marital bond itself.  I found it well written, packed with great detail and good dialogue; very efficient and multi-layered.
The part I found most interesting was the way Mr. Waythorn went from being the jealous, insecure husband to feeling obliged to and comforted by his wifes' ex-husbands(Haskett 1st, Varick 2nd). He, it seems to me, began to accept the unmovable past, show maturity and, actually, value his wife's life experience despite comparing her to a "bowling shoe"!?(mine, not Wharton's).

Gilman, part of the able Beecher line (Lyman, Harriet, Catherine) who had deep roots in the Cincinnati and SW Ohio area, wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" which can be best desribed simply, as "haunting". As someone who has done a fair bit of home remodeling can atest, I have found the process of  removing ugly wallpaper(whether the pattern looks like "torture" or not) to be among the most tedious.  The narrator in this story is dealing with a depression or psychosis that is spiraling to darker bowels of her brain as the story progresses.  After reading the intro to Gilman, it seems that this story is probably very autobiographical and, one can only hope, somewhat therapeutic as well.  The husband, John, a medical doctor, is patriarchal and overbearing to a flaw despite his seemingly genuine concern for his sick wife. Medicine in the 1890's was still very crude(antibiotics or "germ therapy" was just starting to be tested); not to mention the fact that Postpartum depression is still not very well understood and to some extent still talked about almost as a taboo subject.  This, in  my opinion, just adds to the horror of this story; knowing that Dr. John was exacerbating his wife's illness with his dictatorial prescriptions. In the end,  she was stricken and confined not only by her clinical depression but also by "The Man-Made World" in which she lived.             

Bierce short story

I found "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" quite compelling and suspenseful.  The style and mechanics of  the story were very well done by Bierce, himself, a former soldier in the Union Army during the Civil War.  Creatively written, the author managed to weave history, espionage and psychological intrigue into this brief story.  At the end, when the reader becomes aware and the final twist is revealed the first thoughts to my mind were that of "hope" and "denial" about the planter's mindset about his impending fate. 
Something not specifically defined but rather left fairly vague were Mr. Farquhar's "circumstances of an imperious nature" which prevented him from fighting, at the spry age of 35, in the Confederate Army. It is possible to speculate, with a historical lens, that Mr. Farquhar had bought a "substitute" to fight in the Civil War in his place considering the fact that he was a "well-to-do planter"; this was a common practice among the upper class in the South and the inequities of the Confederate draft are well documented.  Maybe this contributed to a feeling of guilt within Mr. Farquhar and, therefore, made him even more apt to be tricked into the plot to burn the bridge?  Great story; I think it was a Hitchcock series episode on TV in 1959.


    

jewett and twain shorts

I liked the "The White Heron" better than the Twain piece even though there were some clever uses of colloqial speech and humorous dialogue in the latter.  I really enjoyed the Jewett short -- reminded me a bit of a great children's author, Robert McClosky(also from the northeast), in its setting and theme.  I was really pulling for "Sylvy" to make the choice that she did in the end; ten dollars was probably a great deal of money in 1886 for an eight year old or any commoner for that matter.  The grandmother, "Mrs. Tilley" was written with a beautiful regional dialect and the natural setting was well described-- I'd like to go find that tree myself now! I do wonder if "Sylvy" would have made the same choice had she been 15ish and equally attracted to the young hunter; I think the pressure to divulge the graceful bird's dwelling would have been even greater than it already was. 
Secondarily, this short made me think about how societal trends/conformity affect our natural environment; Egrets and many other birds as well as beavers and bison were hunted nearly to extinction for aesthetic fashion or ornament during these times; now and for the last decade or so, the lack of originality of the well-healed at high end restaurants has done the same thing to the Chilean sea bass. Smelt anyone! 

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