My Extended Essay on the Yellow Wallpaper
Since the first semester of Junior year is ending, we had to already start working on our extended essay such as choosing the topic. I always knew I wanted to do some work of Sylvia Plath. However, because it'd be weak by itself, I decided to connect it to the Yellow WallPaper.
The Yellow Wallpaper shows the story of a woman who has postpartum depression and moves into a summer house with her family. Because of her illness, she andher husband choose to live in a room which had an odd yellow wallpaper. Because of this factor and others, she slowly grows mad throughout the book. Furthermore, it is one of the first books of Charlotte Gilman that is in first person, therefore showing us a limiting and biased perspective.
The first connection we can make to the Theory of Knowledge course is the sense of perspective; as mentioned before, the book is written in first person therefore we only view the main character's view on the whole situation and comprehending what she is going through rather than the reality of the whole situation. Moreover, we can connect the book to the the area of knowledge of history as the author wrote it to express how women were perceived in the 19th century and their role in society. Likewise, the relations to the ways of knowing are: reasoning, as the actions she does throughout the book she believes is logical, emotion, since she is gradually growing more mad throughout the book, sense of perception, because we only see the book in her eyes and never the whole story. In fact, this also links to the concept of truth and what it truly is as there will always be bias.
There was a book we read in English class called the Things They Carried which shows the story of a solider in the Vietnam war and all of his colleges throughout the war. Tim O'brien, the author, would specify their lives during and after the war and how it had impacted them. With this, the topic of truth is constantly mentioned when he brings up the stories of not only himself though the other soldiers as well. The author describes the truth as, "It's time to be blunt... I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story truth is truer sometimes than happening truth" (16). In other words, the author calls himself out as there will always be a piece of the story which is changed from the reality.
Here's a video which gives a summary and analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper in case the reader wants to go more in depth with the book.
This video is an animations of the occurrences in the Yellow Wallpaper therefore the reader should watch the video on the left hand side first to fully comprehend what is going on as the video doesn't explain but shows the summary of the book.
Since the author of The Things They Carried constantly plays around with the truth in his novel, in this video he is asked to talk about a real story that was related to his experience in Vietnam.