I Don't Want To Grow Up

Disorientated, confused, annoying, and stupid are a few adjectives that describe my feelings about this hypertext story, The University of the Yellow Wallpaper. Why do people make these types of stories? Don't they realize that readers aren't going to sit at a computer screen and click on every link and read every word?

Okay, so now that I got my feelings out of the way, I will look a little closer at this dreadful reading. Throughout the story, the author makes several references to her childhood. She also includes an image of a child there is an image of a child from the waist up. where she explains through one of her links that it is "not a realistic representation, a related copy, an idea such as we might get from figurative painting; it is a scene made up by blocks of meaning, at once varied, repeated, and discontinuous".

It seems that she is not very confident in herself for she explains that she " will have become the post-graduate, who by sheer terror, boredom, anger, frustration, melancholy, or witty intelligence, decided to terminate my indefinite subscription to higher learning; I will opt to drop out of the University of Yellow Wallpaper, owing to the fact that the voices have strongly suggested I cease listening to the anterior voices, who whisper, "you are an infantile wish fulfillment..." She describes voices telling her to give up. Who are these voices? Is she crazy? Is The University of the Yellow Wallpaper an insane asylum. She indicates that the university is on the hills near an insane asylum, but never says that she is admitted into it.

Her professor told her class about the idea of "existential 'nothingness,' as simply to be and not to be, expressing the fact that nonbeing is an inseparable part of being, grasping what it means to exist, I need to grasp the fact that I might not exist, that I tread at every moment on the sharp edge of possible annihilation and can never escape the fact that death will arrive at some unknown moment in the future (but I always knew this)!" She seems very gloomy and depressed.

As I clicked along with the text, I came across a passage that goes a little in detail about her childhood and how she has felt.

"...you used to say to me that I am a great young girl, and though you left me here to perish, though you put beneath my feet a great howling pit of emptiness, the words that lie at the bottom of my soul leap forth and they light the shadows below me; I am the one who was lost in the crowd, whom the fizzing lights made dizzy, a subaltern who saw everything about her reduced to absurdity, for if I were truly a great young girl the specters would cease bellowing; I was a young child with a body and soul, I had a heart that was not protected by a steel vault, and when I had moments of ecstasy I would sing with burning sparks"

The young girl, or woman, however old she may be, is very unforgiving of her parent(s) actions when she was little. She was empty. She was a young girl with a body, soul, and emotions whose heart was unprotected by her parent(s).

Us as a reader you get an inside glimpse of her childhood.The young woman seemed as if she didn't want her mother to leave because she knew that she was being sent away to The University of Yellow Wallpaper, where one can only assume, is most likely some sort of psychiatric ward where she could recover. But what causes her to become psychotic? Was it her family, the voices in her head that she still hear? To me, it seems that her childhood is what caused her to be so disoriented and confused.

As Maddie writes, "White displays in this excerpt the age old dilemma of a child facing the great troubles of adulthood and the adult that still wished the inner child time to play. The continuing sentences, though correct, reflect both the continuity of time as well as the child-like desire to pour something out that either excites or sorrows in one mad long rush."

Don't we all feel like that? We wish to stay young forever and avoid the trials and tribulations that adulthood has awaiting for us. I know I do. =]