Excellent context for “The Yellow Wallpaper”

If, like me, you are having trouble reading the smudged font of the Weir Mitchell piece linked below, you can find an excellent secondary source in a wonderful 1983 essay by Suzanne Poirier: “The Weir Mitchell rest cure: doctor and patients,” from Women’s Studies.

Weir Mitchell’s rest cure

Silas Weir Mitchell, who was Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s doctor and who is directly named in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” recorded his theory about the rest cure in the book Fat and Blood (1884). You can read (and download) the pertinent chapter—”Rest”—here.

Listening to “Araby”

There are two scholarly reasons to listen to our short stories read aloud, if you have the opportunity.

The most successful reading of a text is usually a re-reading of it: when you approach the text without having to learn its characters and plot anew you can concentrate on the subtleties of its language and rhythm. And one way to master the language and the rhythm of the masterful short stories we are reading this summer is to listen to recordings of them.

LibriVox.org is the main source of free recordings of English-language texts, and—like any service staffed by volunteers—the recordings they offer vary in quality. The good news, though, is that there is a wonderful reading of “Araby” by Julie VW that is fully worth your downloading and listening to before we get to that story on Friday.

There are fully five recordings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “Yellow Wallpaper,” the story we will discuss in section on Thursday. I am perhaps partial to the recording by Michelle Sullivan.

There is also a complete recording of Great Expectations on LibriVox, though it runs 20+ hours. Still, the recording can be a good supplement to reading through the text if you find yourself wanting to revisit the beginning of the novel when you are halfway through it.