English_257_-_Sample_Literary_Analysis_(1)_(1)
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Student Last Name 1
Student Name
Essay Title
Thesis Statement:
The short stories "The Monkey Garden," "Young Goodman Brown," and "The Yellow
Wallpaper" together illustrate the idea that when a place has a special significance it may feel as
if it never leaves us—or that we never leave it.
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Student Name
Mr. Hoffer
English 102
4 March 2021
Essay Title
Our physical and emotional environments shape our whole perspective of life. When a
particular environment is important to us, it may seem impossible to separate ourselves from it,
leading often times to a variety of consequences. Throughout literature and other storytelling
mediums, such as film, we encounter characters who are tied to physical and emotional spaces
which haunt them deeply. It could be a loss of innocence or companionship, or an increase of
fear and paranoia, that impacts these characters and links them to specific places. For many of
these characters it can feel as though they can never escape their past, thoughts, or even
themselves.
The short stories "The Monkey Garden," "Young Goodman Brown," and "The
Yellow Wallpaper" together illustrate the idea that when a place has a special significance it may
feel as if it never leaves us—or that we never leave it.
“The Monkey Garden” by Sandra Cisneros puts the emphasis on an evocative location
right in the title, thereby emphasizing its thematic importance. The main character in the story
describes a garden that has had an important place in her heart. This is where she was at her
happiest, among the “dizzy bees” and “[s]weet sweet peach trees” and “big green apples hard as
knees,” but also where she discovers just how low she could feel (Cisneros 95). This awareness
becomes undeniable when she states, "This is where I wanted to die and where I tried one day,
but not even the monkey garden would have me. It was the last day I would go there” (96). In the
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story the character believes that she is standing up for her friend and protecting her from a group
of boys, and even enlists the aid of one of the boys’ mothers.
But neither the mother, who is
busy ironing, nor the friend, who is compliant in a kissing game with the boys, cares about the
narrator’s intervention. In a moment of painful remembrance, she tells us, "They all looked at me
as if
I
was the one that was crazy and made me feel ashamed. And then I don't know why but I
had to run away. I had to hide myself at the other end of the monkey garden, in the jungle part,
under a tree that wouldn't mind if I lay down and a cried a long time" (97).
In her shame she
feels that she loses her garden of childhood play, where car roofs were “giant mushrooms” and
“sunflowers [were] big as flowers on Mars” (96, 94). However, the bittersweet memory of it
stays with her, deep in her, almost archaeologically, as symbolized in the garden’s undersoil,
where “beneath the roots of soggy flowers were the bones of murdered pirates and dinosaurs,”
and, in an image of lost possibilities, “the eye of a unicorn turned to coal” (96).
In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown,” the title character
travels to and enters a dark forest, one symbolic of his doubt. Brown’s faith is tested when he is
challenged in his religion and his very identity, having been lured by a mysterious man who not
only claims to know his father and grandfather, but who also seems to be a version of Young
Goodman himself. Leaving his wife Faith behind at sunset and “assisted by the uncertain light,”
Brown journeys further away from his Puritan community until he can sense that evil is lurking
behind every tree he passes (Hawthorne 2). “What if the devil himself should be at my very
elbow!” he exclaims, which appears to conjure up his traveling companion, complete with a
walking stick “[bearing] the likeness of a great black snake.” Through Goodman’s journey it is
revealed to him that Salem village isn’t as innocent as it seems because he is exposed to his
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community's darkness, the very inverse of its daytime piety. He never recovers from the
experience, as Hawthorne informs us: "And when he had lived long, and was borne to his
grave, a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged woman, and children and grand-children, a
goodly procession, besides neighbors, not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his
tombstone, for his dying hour was gloom" (13). This passage occurs at the end of the story and
we can use it to show that even though Young Goodman Brown has these doubts about his
perceived reality he still stays in his community with his wife.
However, his time in the forest,
whether real or imagined, lingers even more deeply in his soul.
The idea of what is real or imagined, and how that connects to place, clearly informs the
short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This Victorian-era story
involves the rest cure prescribed to women and its ironically deleterious effects on their health,
particularly their mental health. The unnamed narrator—who may or may not be named Jane—
chronicles her own undoing in a series of narrative fragments built around her recuperative stay
in a “colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house,” although that last
detail, as the narrator concedes, may be an example of her “imaginative power and habit of story-
making” (Gilman 77, 80). “The Yellow Wallpaper” focuses on what the narrator sees, or
perceives, both inside the house and in the surrounding landscape, but everything comes back to
the titular wallpaper, its “hideous” color, its “torturing” patterns, even its smell (85). In fact, it is
the odd and ambiguous smell of the wallpaper that prompts the narrator to contemplate the
elements of her imprisonment:
I noticed it the moment we came into the room, but with so much air and sun it
was not bad. Now we have had a week of fog and rain, and whether the windows are
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open or not, the smell is here.
It creeps all over the house.
I find it hovering in the dining-room, skulking in the parlor, hiding in the hall,
lying in wait for me on the stairs.
It gets into my hair.
[…]
It used to disturb me at first. I thought seriously of burning the house—to reach
the smell.
But now I am used to it. The only thing I can think of that it is like is the
color
of
the paper! A yellow smell. (87-88)
Notice that the smell of the wallpaper is personified as something that creeps, hovers, skulks,
hides, and lies in wait for the narrator, like a monster, or perhaps something monstrous that is
developing in her. The smell also, ultimately, can only be defined in terms of color, as if all the
woman’s senses, all her perceptions, circle back on themselves. By the end of the story, she, too,
is creeping around the room, crawling over her physician husband, John, who embodies the era’s
dismissive attitudes towards women and who himself has fainted, almost comedically, like a
stereotype of a Victorian woman overcome by vapors. As the narrator makes her circuit around
the bedroom, her “shoulder […] fits in [a] long smooch around the wall,” in a groove in the
wallpaper, as if to signify her never leaving its confines—or, as she puts it, “so [that] I cannot
lose my way” (91).
However, the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” does lose her way, or her mind, just as
Young Goodman Brown loses his religious devotion, and the character in “The Monkey Garden”
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leaves her childhood innocence behind, with all of them fixated on a place. Whether through
madness, loss, or imagination, they are able to access a place deep within themselves that
connects to the external physical location that they find themselves in. In each of their journeys,
they seem to reach down or into some place deep in all of us. They seem to embody the truth of
Carl Jung’s statement, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of the light, but
by making the darkness conscious” (qtd. in Asma 279). This sort of enlightenment may not lead
to simple or easy forms of happiness, but it does illuminate the places in our common humanity:
our adventurous and inquisitive younger mindset, our perplexed and questioning maturity, and
our ever-present human vulnerability.
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Works Cited
Asma, Stephen T.
On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears
. Oxford UP, 2009.
Cisneros, Sandra. “The Monkey Garden.”
The House on Mango Street
. Vintage, 2009, pp. 94-98.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
40 Short Stories: A Portable Anthology
. 3
rd
ed., edited by Beverly Lawn, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009, pp. 77-92.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “Young Goodman Brown.” ---, pp. 1-13.