Essay #3 Rough Draft

This is a very rough draft of my essay. I didn't really have enough time to really develop some of my ideas and I plan on adding some more examples and quotes. Hopefully my theme comes across and makes sense!


Megan Smith
English Composition II
Essay #3: Rough Draft
July 1, 2011

Trapped Inside Love

The readings in class thus far have showed us that love is unique because it is not just a feeling, it is an ability. Love can be kind and gentle and filled with bliss and joy, but love also has the ability to produce rage and jealousy. One important factor of love is the feeling and emotion an individual has within them. Although unfortunate, love has the capability to make someone feel trapped. In "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "Jealous Husband Returns in the Form of a Parrot" we are able to see how people sometimes feel emotionally trapped within themselves and within their relationship. It is important to understand how people choose to express their feelings since on one hand some people take control of their feelings and tell others how they feel, while on the other hand, some people tend to keep to themselves and let their feelings control them.

After reading the first few lines of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the reader can immediately feel the upbeat and friendly nature of the woman. When she begins to describe her husband, it becomes obvious that she is in a marriage that has trapped her and does not allow her to be who she is. The woman states, “John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.” (729) This seems to express everything that she is, and everything her husband does not like, which shows how she is trapped in her marriage.

The woman is trapped within herself because she follows the rules that are set out before her. The woman states that “I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good…. I sometimes fancy that in my condition if I had less opposition and more society and stimulus- but John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad.” (729) This shows that she is trapped within herself because she thinks she knows what is best to do but never listens to herself even when she knows her husband is wrong. She does not allow herself to be her own person.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” we see that when the parrot was man and he was intimate with his wife, he still felt trapped. “It’s like those times when she would tell me she loved me and I actually believed her and maybe it was true and we clung to each other in bed and at times like that I was different. I was the man in her life. I was whole with her. Except even at that moment, holding her sweetly, there was this other creature inside me who knew a lot more about it and couldn’t quite put all the evidence together to speak.” (767)

In “Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot,” the man felt trapped because he was never able to catch his wife cheating because “I had a bare chest and I’d look for little black hairs on the sheets when I’d come home on a day with the whiff of somebody else in the air.” (766) The man knew what was going on but he never caught her cheating. The parrot is similar because “My cage sits in the den. My pool table is gone and the cage is sitting in that space and if I come all the way down to one end of my perch I can see through the door and down the back hallway to the master bedroom. When she keeps the bedroom door open I can see the space at the foot of the bed but not the bed itself. That I can sense to the left, just out of sight. I watch the men go in and I hear the sounds but I can’t quite see. And they drive me crazy.” (767-768) This shows that even the parrot felt trapped because he was able to get so close to seeing what his wife was doing, but was unable to.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the woman wanted to express her thoughts and feelings through writing, yet her husband made attempts to prevent this from happening, “There comes John, and I must put this away- he hates to have me write a word.” (731) This shows that the woman wanted to express her feelings and thoughts in some manner because how she writes is in a similar manner as if she was talking to someone. She feels trapped because she wants to express her feelings this way but she it is frowned upon by John.

In Butler’s story, when the man’s wife began to talk about the new guy at her office in the shipping department, the man immediately thought that she was cheating on him with this new guy. The man reacted and expressed his feelings in a two-fold manner; the first with rage and then the second out of pure jealousy. First, the man stated “I locked myself in the bathroom because I couldn’t rage about this anymore. I felt like a damn fool whenever I actually said anything about this kind of feeling and she looked at me like she could start hating me real easy and so I was working on saying nothing, even if it meant locking myself up.” (767) This shows how the man was trapped within himself and within his relationship because he would get so upset but could not openly express his feelings to his wife. He also literally trapped himself in the bathroom. The man got upset but had to hide his feelings; he expressed his feelings by himself but was trapped from expressing his feelings to his wife.

The second manner in which the man reacted to his wife talking about the new guy at work was by finding the new guys’ name and address and went to go spy on him. “Nobody was around in the neighborhood and there was this big tree in he back of the house going up to a second-floor window that was making funny little sounds. I went up. The shade was drawn but not quite all the way. I was holding on to a limb with arms and legs wrapped around it like it was her in those time when I could forget the others for a little while. But the crack in the shade was just out of view and I crawled on along till there was no limb left and I fell on my head.” (767) This shows that the man expressed his feelings because he was so angry about the situation and he wanted to have solid proof of his wife cheating. Although his jealousy caused his death, the man was able to express his feelings of distrust, suspicion and anger through this action.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the woman eventually takes a turn for the worst and seems to have lost her mind as she is so consumed by the wallpaper. After John began to see improvement in her health, the woman wrote, “I had no intention of telling him is was because of the wallpaper – he would make fun of me. He might even want to take me away.” (737) Once she become trapped by the wallpaper that surrounded her, she began expressing herself in a manner that made John believe she was getting better, when really she was going insane.

In Butler’s story, the parrot refers to “a burning thrashing feeling” (767) in regards to the “dangling thing over there with knows ad strips of rawhide and a bell at the bottom” (767) in his cage, which was the same feeling he got when he thought his wife was cheating. In order to control this “burning thrashing feeling,” (767) the parrot stated that “I flap my wings and I squawk and I fluff up and I slick down and I throw seed and I attack that dangly toy as if it were the guy’s balls, but it does no good. It never did any good in the other life either, the trashing around I did by myself.” (768) The parrot does state that it makes him feel good, but he knows that it does not solve the issue at hand; it just allows him to express his feelings. He can express his feelings, but he feels trapped because his actions don’t change the problem.