This is why I am not an artist…..

I just finished the second half of, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and I decided to give the “Sketching My Way Through the Text” strategy a shot. Daniels and Zemelman explained that this strategy is extremely effective and allows the reader to expand their knowledge. I am by NO means an artist, so I was skeptical but figured it would be a good opportunity to test out this strategy. (Seriously, I can’t even draw a straight line with a ruler)

So here is my first page of sketching

 

I wasn’t quite sure where to start with these sketches, so I just tried to draw (not very well….) what I saw in my mind as I was reading. The first sketch was after the narrator explained that she only truly showed her emotions, and cried when she was in the room by herself. She especially held in her emotions when her husband, John, was around. 

The next sketch is how I envisioned the wallpaper in her room to look. She describes that she sees a woman creeping in the corner of the pattern, so I thought that she would have been 

intertwined with the pattern on the wall. After I completed my reading, I was doing some research on the story and found this image. Although this isn’t how I pictured the woman within the wallpaper to look, I enjoyed looking through other images and seeing how other people interpreted the wallpaper to look. 

My next drawing is just an image of two stick figures, one being the narrator and the other being John. After reading about their interactions, I kept on picturing the narrator as being controlled by John. He seemed to hold her at a very low standard, and belittle her in many scenes. At one point in the story he refers to her as “little girl” (679). Between his language towards his wife, the way he treats her, and the way she almost seems to fear him, I realized the power struggle in their relationship that seemed more like a father/daughter relationship than a husband/wife. All of these reasons are why I drew the stick figure of the narrator to be much smaller than the one of John. 

Here is a picture of my next set of sketches. I decided not to include 2 of the sketches, because I didn’t want to give away too much of the story… but it was a sketch and a little chart about a realization I came to about the story. The first sketch is of a nose, because the narrator says that after they have had so much rain and fog that the smell of the wallpaper is much more pungent. This struck me because she goes on and on about the smell, how it travels through the house, gets stuck in her hair. She describes it as “…a yellow smell” (682). This was very strange to me, especially when she says initially that the smell was tempting her to burn the house so she would not have to smell it anymore, but that it doesn’t bother her anymore. My final sketch that I will include in this post is of women behind bars. The narrator talks about the woman in the wallpaper, and how when the light hits the paper a certain way that it looks like she is behind bars (which I pictured to be like a jail cell). Later on, she talks about how sometimes it looks like there are many women behind the bars. I found it interesting and questioned where these other women came from, which is why I chose to sketch this out to try to help myself see it better and understand the meaning behind it. 

I have to say, even though I am not an artist (by any stretch!) and I was unsure about this strategy, I am glad that I gave it a try. Usually, as I mentioned in my first blog post about this story, I read with a pen in my hand so that I can take notes in the margins, underline quotes and write down questions. It was difficult at first to put my pen to the blank sheet of paper and actually draw what I would have normally written down. I do think that the strategy was helpful, and it allowed me to look back at my drawings after I completed the text and actually SEE what I was imagining during my first reading. This was definitely useful, especially with a text that was as complicated as this one. I don’t know that I will use the sketching strategy all of the time, but I am sure I will use it once in a while, and I definitely will be bringing it into the classroom once I am teaching.