Through the Wallpaper

We read The Yellow Wallpaper back in my junior year, in AP Lit. The class only had five people in it, counting the teacher, so we got to get pretty in-depth.

I remember, for no reason whatsoever, the teacher gave me--just me--a piece of paper and told me to draw something from the story. So I did. In crayola crayons. I drew the ending scene, where she's crawling around the room, and if I remember correctly she's tied herself to the bedpost, and all the paper has been torn off the walls. I also drew her husband passed out in the doorway, except you can only see his feet.

The end result was pretty disturbing. I was really proud of myself, but the other teachers said we couldn't pin it up on the walls in case one of the parents saw it. (They're not complete fascists, though: I later drew a stick-figure comic of Faustus in chatspeak and was allowed to put that on the wall.)

That's nice, Christina, you say. Now what does this have to do with hypertext fiction?

Just by looking at the name of this work, I was pretty sure it was a reference to the short story. I mean, how much yellow wallpaper can there be in one world? I had the luck to find this and this page, which confirmed my suspicions. I think I would have been a little disappointed if I hadn't found them. Sometimes I think hypertext fiction is just luck. I tried really hard to get to all the pages, but you can never be certain. I got caught in a loop a few times while I was reading. Circles don't have an end.

The title, The University of Yellow Wallpaper, gives me the impression that the writer thinks her experiences are comparable to those of the woman in the original story, or maybe even worse. University suggests a more advanced state of being, to me. It's not just yellow wallpaper, no, it's a whole university of madness.

There were some mentions of looking-glasses in this as well, (The writer even goes through a "Looking-Glass stage". Because she chose to say "looking glass" rather than "mirror", I assumed she was referencing Carrol's Through the Looking-Glass.

What I saw in the "looking-glass phase" rather seriously calls into question any sense of progression or regression in relation to movement through time.

--The University of Yellow Wallpaper

From a technical point of view, such a personal story like this may not be a wise choice. Hypertext novels are hard enough to read as they are. Without a real storyline to follow, it makes things even more confusing. If I disliked the narrator, all hope would be lost, and this would just become self-indulgent ramblings, punctuated by yellow-and-pink lemonade hyperlinks.

I think my ideal hypertext novel would be a cross between this (beautifully written) and a story with a traditional plot. Though maybe I'm trying too hard to force my ideas of what a story is onto something completely new. I just don't think a hypertext novel needs to be complete anarchy, or a celebration of chaos. I would like to see someone take this medium in a different direction, similar to The Heist, only actually well-written, and perhaps a bit more clear. I just feel like the writers of these things aren't considering their audiences as much as they should.

I would also be interested in how much of this little adventure through the wallpaper is based on fact.

We're all mad here.