![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
libraryseraphAn essay from a university course I'm still very proud of
Alienation is a significant theme in all literary traditions and in many of the works studied in this course. Alienation is a state of being isolated or separated from something one should belong to, and it emerges as a natural consequence of complex interactions. Alienation is usually examined in the context of society, with people either being forcibly alienated from society, or alienating themselves from society willingly. Even the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first narrative work known, is about alienation and struggles with society. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh must establish stable relationships with society and humanity. He is first isolated from humanity by his arrogance and cruelty. Later, he alienates himself from society after Enkidu’s death. He stops grooming himself, acts irrationally, and is described and animalistic. He also seeks immortality, which would remove him from the natural cycles of life an death, and thus from humanity. It is only by rejoining society and accepting his place at king that he can find some kind of fulfillment. Themes of alienation can also be taken beyond the individual, to deal with the experience of groups that are alienated from society. Any work that deals with gender, race or social status, deals with alienation, and particularly deals with forced social alienation for arbitrary reasons. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries in particular, rights movements began increasing awareness of these alienated groups. The experience of struggling with society or being rejected by it fueled not only political activism, but also literary creation, with stories being written about women, the poor, and other groups. The Metamorphosis and The Yellow Wallpaper are two works of literature from this time period which discuss alienation. Both of them are particularly focussed on the social alienation cause by disability. The Metamorphosis uses the titular transformation as a metaphor for physical disability, as well as dealing with the alienation caused by the capitalist system. The Yellow Wallpaper focusses on mental disability, as well as the roles forced on women. Both of them are deeply rooted in their authors’ experiences and build on these experiences to make broader points about social alienation.
Franz Kafka was born in Austria in 1883, to a Jewish family. He had a strained relationship with his family as an adult, particular with his father. As a young man, he worked a variety of jobs which he hated, including working as an insurance salesman. In his 30s, he was diagnosed with the disease tuberculosis. This prevented him from working, and he spent the rest of his life in sanatoriums until his death from tuberculosis complications at 40. People who were close to Kafka during his life described him as being deeply troubled, believing himself to be mentally and physically repulsive and being unable to form romantic connections with women, and various modern thinkers have diagnosed him with mental illnesses including depression and schizotypical personality disorder. His most famous work, the Metamorphosis, was written shortly after his diagnosis with tuberculosis in 1915, and shows Kafka’s self-hatred and feelings of alienation. The main character, Gregor Samsa, is a traveling salesman with a domineering father and strained home life who is literally transformed into a giant insect one morning. The combination of work under a capitalist system and disability is here portrayed as literally dehumanizing in the most intense sense. When Gregor wakes up turned into a giant insect, his first thoughts are of what a terrible life being a travelling salesman is. He is exhausted all the time, deprived of regular human contact, and has no agency in his own life. The two forms of dehumanization, literal and figurative, are therefore connected. Similarly, Gregor’s concern that the doctor will be called in and he will have to take a sick day overrides all his other concerns for his own well being and condition. Gregor has already been thoroughly alienated by the time the story starts by the capitalist society he lives in. As the story continues, Gregor’s situation becomes an even clearer metaphor for disability. He is left unable to work and his family must care for him. Without Gregor’s money coming into the house, his parents and sister have to enter the workforce. His family responds to Gregor after his transformation in differing ways. His mother is kept away from him for her own good, despite wishing to look after him. His father, who is an overbearing strict man very similar to Kafka’s own, is disgusted by Gregor and his condition, and reacts violently whenever he sees him. His sister Greta is the one who looks after him, but is still disgusted by and afraid of him. Gregor is desperate to hold onto his human life, but without his family interacting with him in any way, all he has left is looking out the window, and trying to listen in on his family. As time goes on, his family begins to forget more and more about his human life and his family connections with them, and they begin to resent him. Gregor’s father at one point attacks and seriously injures Gregor when Gregor leaves his room. Gregor eventually escapes his room when his sister gives a violin performance for their lodgers, desperate to experience community and human interaction again. This reveals his presence to the lodgers the family has taken in. Gregor’s family sees his existence as a shameful secret, which would taint them through association with him. After this, Greta declares that Gregor is no longer a human and no longer her brother, because if he was he would have died long ago and saved them the burden of looking after him and the shame of having him in their family. Gregor has lost the ability to work as well as the ability to be in human society in any way, and it is therefore acceptable to consider him no longer human, no matter what his life and relationships were life beforehand. Kafka, having recently lost his ability to work due to his own illness, would have been concerned about his future and his place in the world, and this shows through in the story.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892. It is a fictionalized account of the confinement and abuse the author experienced in the name of treating her post-partum depression. Gilman’s emotional problems had their roots in early life. Her mother, traumatized by Gilman’s father abandoning her, refused to show affection to her children on the grounds it would keep them safer from heartbreak. At the age of 25, Gilman suffered a bout of intense post partum depression after the birth of her daughter, leaving her emotionally despondent and bedridden. Her husband at first ignored her complaints, and then got a doctor’s recommendation for her to spend all her time resting and caring for their child, completely barring her from any sort of work or writing. Gilman’s condition worsened under these restrictions, and it was separating from her husband and beginning to work again that helped her live and managed her depression. This experience led to Gilman becoming a campaigner for women’s rights, including the right to work outside the home and the redefining of marriage to be an equal partnership. These experiences are blatantly mirrored in The Yellow Wallpaper, which is told from the point of view of a nameless woman, confined by her husband in a room in a summer home after the birth of her child. As she spends more and more time confined and forbidden from intellectual pursuits, she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper in her room, and eventually begins to see the wallpaper’s patterns as a trapped woman that she projects on. Gilman was particularly focussed on sexism and the effects that mental illness had on a woman’s life. Both Gilman and the Yellow Wallpaper’s protagonist have their depression overlooked, in favour of ideas men impose on them. The protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper is aware that the birth of her child has affected her in a very real way and that being confined isn’t helping her, but both her husband and her doctor insist that her depression is just her being hysterical and inventing things, and that the solution is to keep her away from anything that could be too taxing or exciting. Especially in the late 19th early 20th century, mental illness and disability were used to silence women who behaved inappropriately. Like the Metamorphosis, The Yellow Wallpaper also examines the dehumanization of those who have been alienated from society and therefore marked as other. The protagonist begins to see patterns in the titular wallpaper, and tracing these patterns is the only thing she has to occupy herself. Eventually, she perceives the patterns as woman or group of women, who are trapped in the wallpaper like she is trapped in the room. At the end of the story, she loses her ability to distinguish between the wallpaper and herself and begins tearing the wallpaper off the wall so she will never be trapped again. Unlike in The Metamorphosis, the dehumanization of the disabled is here portrayed as almost a source of power. The protagonist’s connection with the women in the wallpaper give her a source of self-actualization when everything has been stripped from her, and at the very end of the story her mental breakdown is portrayed as a source of complete freedom, since she can no longer cares about her husband or society’s perceptions. The Yellow Wallpaper portrays forced alienation as torturous and harmful, but self-alienation from the same society that alienates people as freeing.
Alienation is one of the greatest human concerns, and this is reflecting in literature. The dual challenges of fitting into society and with other humans, and of being an individual, are what lies behind many personal conflicts. Similarly, when a group is alienated from society, that group will push back against society and its alienation. The Yellow Wallpaper and the Metamorphosis both revolve around alienation from society. Both main characters end up completely isolated from humanity not only due to their disabilities, but due to how people respond to those disabilities. The root of the conflict in these stories therefore comes from the existence of a society that refuses to accept or accommodate divergence, and which holds its members to impossible standards.
Alienation is a significant theme in all literary traditions and in many of the works studied in this course. Alienation is a state of being isolated or separated from something one should belong to, and it emerges as a natural consequence of complex interactions. Alienation is usually examined in the context of society, with people either being forcibly alienated from society, or alienating themselves from society willingly. Even the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first narrative work known, is about alienation and struggles with society. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh must establish stable relationships with society and humanity. He is first isolated from humanity by his arrogance and cruelty. Later, he alienates himself from society after Enkidu’s death. He stops grooming himself, acts irrationally, and is described and animalistic. He also seeks immortality, which would remove him from the natural cycles of life an death, and thus from humanity. It is only by rejoining society and accepting his place at king that he can find some kind of fulfillment. Themes of alienation can also be taken beyond the individual, to deal with the experience of groups that are alienated from society. Any work that deals with gender, race or social status, deals with alienation, and particularly deals with forced social alienation for arbitrary reasons. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries in particular, rights movements began increasing awareness of these alienated groups. The experience of struggling with society or being rejected by it fueled not only political activism, but also literary creation, with stories being written about women, the poor, and other groups. The Metamorphosis and The Yellow Wallpaper are two works of literature from this time period which discuss alienation. Both of them are particularly focussed on the social alienation cause by disability. The Metamorphosis uses the titular transformation as a metaphor for physical disability, as well as dealing with the alienation caused by the capitalist system. The Yellow Wallpaper focusses on mental disability, as well as the roles forced on women. Both of them are deeply rooted in their authors’ experiences and build on these experiences to make broader points about social alienation.
Franz Kafka was born in Austria in 1883, to a Jewish family. He had a strained relationship with his family as an adult, particular with his father. As a young man, he worked a variety of jobs which he hated, including working as an insurance salesman. In his 30s, he was diagnosed with the disease tuberculosis. This prevented him from working, and he spent the rest of his life in sanatoriums until his death from tuberculosis complications at 40. People who were close to Kafka during his life described him as being deeply troubled, believing himself to be mentally and physically repulsive and being unable to form romantic connections with women, and various modern thinkers have diagnosed him with mental illnesses including depression and schizotypical personality disorder. His most famous work, the Metamorphosis, was written shortly after his diagnosis with tuberculosis in 1915, and shows Kafka’s self-hatred and feelings of alienation. The main character, Gregor Samsa, is a traveling salesman with a domineering father and strained home life who is literally transformed into a giant insect one morning. The combination of work under a capitalist system and disability is here portrayed as literally dehumanizing in the most intense sense. When Gregor wakes up turned into a giant insect, his first thoughts are of what a terrible life being a travelling salesman is. He is exhausted all the time, deprived of regular human contact, and has no agency in his own life. The two forms of dehumanization, literal and figurative, are therefore connected. Similarly, Gregor’s concern that the doctor will be called in and he will have to take a sick day overrides all his other concerns for his own well being and condition. Gregor has already been thoroughly alienated by the time the story starts by the capitalist society he lives in. As the story continues, Gregor’s situation becomes an even clearer metaphor for disability. He is left unable to work and his family must care for him. Without Gregor’s money coming into the house, his parents and sister have to enter the workforce. His family responds to Gregor after his transformation in differing ways. His mother is kept away from him for her own good, despite wishing to look after him. His father, who is an overbearing strict man very similar to Kafka’s own, is disgusted by Gregor and his condition, and reacts violently whenever he sees him. His sister Greta is the one who looks after him, but is still disgusted by and afraid of him. Gregor is desperate to hold onto his human life, but without his family interacting with him in any way, all he has left is looking out the window, and trying to listen in on his family. As time goes on, his family begins to forget more and more about his human life and his family connections with them, and they begin to resent him. Gregor’s father at one point attacks and seriously injures Gregor when Gregor leaves his room. Gregor eventually escapes his room when his sister gives a violin performance for their lodgers, desperate to experience community and human interaction again. This reveals his presence to the lodgers the family has taken in. Gregor’s family sees his existence as a shameful secret, which would taint them through association with him. After this, Greta declares that Gregor is no longer a human and no longer her brother, because if he was he would have died long ago and saved them the burden of looking after him and the shame of having him in their family. Gregor has lost the ability to work as well as the ability to be in human society in any way, and it is therefore acceptable to consider him no longer human, no matter what his life and relationships were life beforehand. Kafka, having recently lost his ability to work due to his own illness, would have been concerned about his future and his place in the world, and this shows through in the story.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1892. It is a fictionalized account of the confinement and abuse the author experienced in the name of treating her post-partum depression. Gilman’s emotional problems had their roots in early life. Her mother, traumatized by Gilman’s father abandoning her, refused to show affection to her children on the grounds it would keep them safer from heartbreak. At the age of 25, Gilman suffered a bout of intense post partum depression after the birth of her daughter, leaving her emotionally despondent and bedridden. Her husband at first ignored her complaints, and then got a doctor’s recommendation for her to spend all her time resting and caring for their child, completely barring her from any sort of work or writing. Gilman’s condition worsened under these restrictions, and it was separating from her husband and beginning to work again that helped her live and managed her depression. This experience led to Gilman becoming a campaigner for women’s rights, including the right to work outside the home and the redefining of marriage to be an equal partnership. These experiences are blatantly mirrored in The Yellow Wallpaper, which is told from the point of view of a nameless woman, confined by her husband in a room in a summer home after the birth of her child. As she spends more and more time confined and forbidden from intellectual pursuits, she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper in her room, and eventually begins to see the wallpaper’s patterns as a trapped woman that she projects on. Gilman was particularly focussed on sexism and the effects that mental illness had on a woman’s life. Both Gilman and the Yellow Wallpaper’s protagonist have their depression overlooked, in favour of ideas men impose on them. The protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper is aware that the birth of her child has affected her in a very real way and that being confined isn’t helping her, but both her husband and her doctor insist that her depression is just her being hysterical and inventing things, and that the solution is to keep her away from anything that could be too taxing or exciting. Especially in the late 19th early 20th century, mental illness and disability were used to silence women who behaved inappropriately. Like the Metamorphosis, The Yellow Wallpaper also examines the dehumanization of those who have been alienated from society and therefore marked as other. The protagonist begins to see patterns in the titular wallpaper, and tracing these patterns is the only thing she has to occupy herself. Eventually, she perceives the patterns as woman or group of women, who are trapped in the wallpaper like she is trapped in the room. At the end of the story, she loses her ability to distinguish between the wallpaper and herself and begins tearing the wallpaper off the wall so she will never be trapped again. Unlike in The Metamorphosis, the dehumanization of the disabled is here portrayed as almost a source of power. The protagonist’s connection with the women in the wallpaper give her a source of self-actualization when everything has been stripped from her, and at the very end of the story her mental breakdown is portrayed as a source of complete freedom, since she can no longer cares about her husband or society’s perceptions. The Yellow Wallpaper portrays forced alienation as torturous and harmful, but self-alienation from the same society that alienates people as freeing.
Alienation is one of the greatest human concerns, and this is reflecting in literature. The dual challenges of fitting into society and with other humans, and of being an individual, are what lies behind many personal conflicts. Similarly, when a group is alienated from society, that group will push back against society and its alienation. The Yellow Wallpaper and the Metamorphosis both revolve around alienation from society. Both main characters end up completely isolated from humanity not only due to their disabilities, but due to how people respond to those disabilities. The root of the conflict in these stories therefore comes from the existence of a society that refuses to accept or accommodate divergence, and which holds its members to impossible standards.
