The distribution of media and literature has definitely changed over the course of the years. There have been newspapers, talk radio, magazines, electronic journals, news websites, blogs, e-books, and most recently webisodes, which are short audio or video presentations on an Internet site.  Joss Whedon has become an integral part of this new found web media with his brilliant release of Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog, which he released in July 2008 during the writers’ strike. While there have been a few other web shows, Dr. Horrible’s is among the widest spread of the bunch, with it’s high quality look, small budget, massive internet following, and big time awards . The production was small, but the aim was immeasurable.

Joss Whedon first had the idea to create Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog during the Writer’s Guild of America strike.  He wanted to create something inexpensive, while making it look professionally done. Whedon wanted to show that Internet content could take off and be a success without the help of a studio to back the production up. He felt that by doing something like Internet content, it would be more efficient than protesting.  He, along with his brother’s and sister in law teamed up to write the concept behind the genius that is Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog. They enlisted the help of actors Nathan Fillion, Felicia Day, and Neil Patrick Harris to make up the three main characters. Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is a wannabe supervillian who is trying to get into the Evil League of Evil.  He’s in love with Penny, played by Felicia Day, whose affections are aimed at the corrupt superhero, Captain Hammer, played by Nathan Fillion. The concept was a metaphorical piece about the extreme cataclysm that was affecting the media during the time of the strike, set in a completely unrealistic science fiction world. 

Although Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog is a comical, fictional piece about a would-be supervillian who is in love with a Human Rights activist and arch rivals with a shady superhero, there is a distinct social commentary found in its satirical humor. Whedon purposefully made this webisode during the writer’s strike, using it as an alternative form of protest to standing outside of Hollywood studios and picketing.  The webisode features a reversal of traditional roles between the antagonist and the protagonist, using them as symbols of Whedon’s real life frustrations with the strike.  Dr. Horrible, an aspiring villain, would be seen as the antagonist in typical works, whereas Captain Hammer, an archetypal superhero, would be seen as the protagonist.  In Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog, however, Dr. Horrible is the protagonist while Captain Hammer is the antagonist.  Hammer clearly represents the corporate world, because they disguise themselves as being “for the people” when all the while they are only concerned about how their deeds will increase their popularity among society.  Dr. Horrible represents the underdog, which is how the writers who were going up against the powerful Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers felt during the writer’s strike. Dr. Horrible must go up against Captain Hammer to take over the world and win the affections of the girl he loves.  Even though Captain Hammer was stronger than Dr. Horrible physically, Dr. Horrible knew that he must try to defeat him, which beautifully parallels the struggles of the writers to stand against the far more powerful producers who were impeding their rights. Thus, the creative process began.

Whedon knew that the only way to get the production done in the way that he wanted to was to do it himself without the help of a big studio’s name added to it.  Many studio executives didn’t think it would be possible to do during a time when television shows and movies were at a standstill and efforts were focused on protest, not production. It is fair to infer that most studio executives also didn’t think that something could get done successfully without the help of big writers and a team of producers to get the ball rolling.  Hollywood executives didn’t know that the internet was slowly becoming this new-fangled outlet for creativity or they would have realized that Whedon’s ideas were those of a complete creative genius.  He knew that the idea would be picked up quickly by viewers because he knew how big the world of online media was slowly becoming.

Once the pre-production was under way, the writers’ strike ended and the actors and crew, Joss Whedon, whose show, Dollhouse, was set to air its pilot, had to start working again. The actors and the creators didn’t let this discourage them. They worked on Dr. Horrible between their other jobs and within a span of a six day shoot, production was finished. The production of this project was funded by Whedon, alone, with the cost reaching just about $200,000. The actors weren’t paid in the beginning, a detail that none of them minded, because they knew that they were a part of a bigger concept that could possibly take the Internet world by storm.

Whedon’s plan was to find a spot where the show could be released and he would be able to repay his cast and crew and also earn his money back.  Hulu.com, an internet website similar to YouTube was the place.   The webisode was released for free online, one act per day, with a promise of an iTunes release date.  The first act was released on July 15, 2008 and the other two followed. By July 20, 2008, all the episodes were taken offline, but re-released on July 28, 2008.  The following was incredible, with over 2.2 million viewers in the first week. By the time the third act came out, viewers were on the edge of their computer chairs waiting for the iTunes release.  On December 19, 2008, the DVD was released entirely on popular shopping site, Amazon.com and became one of the most top selling DVD’s by January 2009.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog has done pretty well for itself. It has won a People’s Choice Award for “Favorite Online Sensation.” It also won seven awards at the 2009 Streamy Awards, including: Audience Choice Award for Best Web Series, Best Directing for a Comedy Web Series, Best Writing for a Comedy Web Series and Best Original Music.   The success of this particular web media has really made waves in terms of the future of entertainment.  Felicia Day, who played Penny in the webisode, said in an interview for entertainment weekly, “I think there are a lot of the things that Hollywood doesn’t understand about the Internet. It’s kind of the reverse of mainstream media: You don’t want to aim for everybody. You want to aim for a targeted audience, and then from there, that passionate audience is going to spread the word. It’s a different approach to creating something for the Internet, and clearly, Joss’s got it.  Dr. Horrible was all word-of-mouth” (EW.com pg. 6). Actors, producers, writers, and those who viewers were already passionate about the writers’ strike and wanted an outlet to vent their frustrations. The creation of Dr. Horrible was a way for these people to expel their annoyance that they may have had because of the early retirement of their favorite network shows.  It was also a way for them to dive into a dream world with a moral foundation.  The intent of this creation was not to make a lot of money in a short amount of time, but rather to have it build slowly over time and continue to be relative in the years to come.  Viewers have made these dreams of Whedon’s that were once just ideas, come to life.

The circulation of media and literature through Internet content has become a way of life for a lot of people.  It’s not to say that print and DVD’s are obsolete, rather, that viewing movies, reading newspaper articles or blogs, and especially dispensing one’s own creative work is more convenient via the internet.  The internet has a way of getting large quantities of people involved without ever having to leave ones home, which is appealing to many.  By viewing Dr. Horrible at home on some idle Tuesday afternoon, the distribution of Whedon’s project was increasing. The increase was so great that by the early hours of Wednesday morning on July 16, 2008, the hosting site for the show had crashed and people were in frenzy. When the crash hit, the server was averaging 200,000 views per hour.  Everyone wanted to watch this incredible surprise of a musical and were very unhappy when its massive popularity made it impossible for them to do so.  Eventually, the site was up and running again and all was right in the world of Dr. Horrible fans.

The amount of followers of Internet content is absolutely incredible. Not to mention how many of those who do read all of their literature and media online in an effort to go green.  There’s no denying that there is a trend that has been going on for years in the direction of online mediums and that the future for creativity seems to be headed in that direction as well.

The uniqueness behind Dr. Horrible’s stems from the fact that Whedon and his family are the ones who own the complete rights to the webisode and are in complete control of it.  Also, supporters of the indie hit are the ones responsible for getting it recognized as they are the people who continue to view it and spread the word about it. Felicia Day spoke in an interview about Dr. Horrible’s distinctiveness, saying “[the] indie spirit that Dr. Horrible had, where people feel like they are participating in its success, is so unique.”  In the world of film and music production, oftentimes there are a bunch of people who get paid and who own parts of the project. The appeal of web media is that one person can be solely responsible for his or her own work and also for the amount of attention that it receives. You don’t have to know a big time movie executive or intern in Hollywood for a chance to have web content, it’s accessible for everyone. Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog has definitely shown people this fact.

While there is still a home for print journalism, CD’s, DVD’s, and books, there is definitely a new space that has been made for internet content. Any type of news, literature, or media entertainment that one wants to know about or read about is right at their hands, which is a definite advantage.  The bargain that one gets with internet content definitely has its appeal, especially with the cost of day to day needs as high as they are now. While the gate was already cracked before Joss Whedon created Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog, he opened the door wide and set the standard higher than ever before.  The world of web media can only get better from here.

Professor DeVries

English 3150

1 December 2009

The Rest Cure and Feminist Theory in The Yellow Wallpaper

For centuries, women have been thought to be irrational creatures who allow their emotions to guide them through life, never using their intellect and thus, never being able to think logically.  Men thought women had no capacity to clearly understand reality and therefore their feelings were invalid.  Women really started to take back their voices through the use of feminist theory in early American literature. The literature illustrated stories of women in very realistic but also very oppressed ways, overcoming the devastating loss of their self to achieve freedom from the confines of societal expectations.  One of the most important pieces of early American feminist thought was a short story called The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  The short story was influenced by Gilman’s own personal experiences with post partum depression and her struggles against her doctor’s false diagnosis.  She was put on a type of rehabilitation called rest cure, which was a type of prescription where the patient, usually a woman, is bound to her home and denied intellectual stimulation. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is also subjected to this cure by her doctor husband, John. It was a brief but important commentary on women’s health and emotions during a time when women were thought to be weak creatures.  In this essay, I will talk about the psychosis and depression the narrator went through because of the rest cure that was implemented for her depression and how this relates to the feminist theory.

In the beginning of The Yellow Wallpaper, the reader is introduced to an unnamed narrator through her first person account of her psychological oppression by her husband, John. Gilman purposefully did not give the narrator a name in this story because it was her way of depicting society’s stereotype that all women were the same and were not in fact separate entities who each had unique emotions. The narrator and her husband have moved to a mansion for the summer, where the narrator is put in a prison type room that has bars on the windows, a bed nailed to the floor, and scattered bits of yellow wallpaper that she is repulsed by.  The room used to be a nursery, but now it has been turned into a rehabilitation area for the narrator to begin her recommended treatment, the rest cure. The rest cure was an actual treatment given to the author, Gilman, after the birth of her child and her slip into depression. It was created by Silas Weir Mitchell and part of the reason why Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper.  Mitchell ordered Gilman to live as domestic a life as possible and to have only two hours of intellectual life a day, “never touching a pen, brush, or pencil again” for as long as she lived (Gilman).    According to “The Rest Cure Revisited” by Diana Martin, M.D., Mitchell felt that, “‘healthy’ for women included strict limits on ‘brain work,’ which he felt imposed nervous strain and might interfere with ‘womanly duties’” (Martin, par. 2).  Mitchell felt that psychological manipulation and the need to keep the patient in a childlike submission was crucial to the rest cure’s ability to show results, which is what John, the narrator’s husband in the story did.  John is Gilman’s representation of her real life physician, Mitchell (Martin par. 3). The narrator begins to slip into a mental break, due to her lack of interaction with the outside world.  Gilman also mentions in an article called “Why I wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,” that due to the rest cure, she almost had a complete mental ruin (Gilman).  Unlike the narrator, Gilman learned that the rest cure was futile to her condition, which she also discovered was caused by post partum depression, and was able to escape before she became insane.

The rest cure is a very interesting rehabilitation technique because it relies on the imprisonment of a young woman to treat a mental disease most often times associated with hysteria.  The rest cure’s main technique for treatment is isolation, bed rest, dieting and massage. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is not allowed to leave her room; her husband goes to such lengths as to put a locked gate that blocks the access to the stairs to keep her confined to her room.  He treats her as if she is a child and even refers to her as a little girl. When she gets out of bed one night to go and touch the wallpaper in her room, he awakens and asks her, “What is it, little girl?” Don’t go walking about like that-you’ll get cold” (Gilman 23). When she tells him that she is not benefiting from her detainment and wishes she could be taken away, he brushes off her feelings, promoting the idea, once again, that women cannot be trusted to accurately describe their feelings. She suggests that she should be out of her room, interacting with people and learn to be a mother to her son and John tells her that she is getting much better due to the rest cure. The narrator explains that she is only getting worse from the segregation.   John does not even give her the respect of talking directly to her when she addresses her case, saying, “Bless her little heart! She shall be as sick as she pleases!” (Gilman 24). He believes her condition has rendered her unable to think and function for herself and thus he believes he must watch over her and control her as one does with a child.   She begins to get very frustrated, but initially, she does not know where to direct her anger. She believes her husband loves her and just wants what is best for her, so she begins to express her anger towards the yellow wallpaper for being the decoration of her imprisonment.  Her frustration and fascination with the yellow wallpaper begins to pull her away from her actuality.

It is theorized that the narrator of this story experienced psychosis, which is defined by Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary as “a loss of contact with reality” (Merriam-Webster).  It is insinuated in the text that the woman’s psychosis may be due  in large part to post partum depression because she has recently given birth to a child that she explains makes her nervous to be around (Gilman14). Post partum depression can cause a person to have a mental break, not unlike the one that the narrator begins to experience through her stay in this room.  She starts off by having a small fascination with the wallpaper, saying,

“I lie here on this great immovable bed-it is nailed down, I believe-and follow that pattern about the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we’ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion” (Gilman 19).

She describes how the longer she stays in the room, the more the wallpaper transforms, especially at night.  She begins to see a woman in the wallpaper, who she doesn’t know at first, is herself, which is a metaphor for the way she feels being stuck in this room without a companion or a creative task to entertain herself.  She notes that “The faint figure behind [the wallpaper] seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (Gilman 23). The narrator becomes enthralled with the woman in the wallpaper and angry that she cannot grab a hold of her because the woman always moves whenever the narrator moves.  She starts to obsess over the hatred of the room because of the yellow wallpaper and the woman that she sees creeping around behind the pattern, trying desperately to escape the bars from the shadows.  The delusions that she is suffering from are manifestations of her own imprisonment. The woman she sees in the wall is none other than herself and the bars that the woman is behind are a representation of the confinement that her husband has put her in.   She decides that she must free the woman in the wallpaper and begins to strip the remaining pieces off of the wall. She realizes that she has come out of the wallpaper once the wallpaper has been torn down. It is her tangible source for imprisonment and she has just broken free of it.  When her husband unlocks the door to see that she has pulled off the wallpaper, she replies, “I’ve got it at last, in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (Gilman 36). Her husband faints in her path and she creeps over him, just like the woman she saw in the wallpaper.

Feminism is described as the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.  In bell hooks’ book called Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, she says, “Contemporary feminist movement in the United States called attention to the exploitation and oppression of women globally” (hooks 34).   It is undeniable that The Yellow Wallpaper is a feminist piece. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, herself, was famous feminist lecturer and writer and her story has been acclaimed as a literary masterpiece for what it stood for in regards to feminist thinking.  With the expansion of the feminist movement, The Yellow Wallpaper was revived.  New age feminists thought the story showed the masculine assertion of power in the nineteenth century of medical professions.  Elaine R. Hedges, an English professor at Towson State University, Maryland, also wrote pieces for the Feminist Press. Professor Hedges writes in her afterword of The Yellow Wallpaper, “For aside from the light it throws on the personal despairs, and the artistic triumph over them, of one of America’s foremost feminists, the story is one of the rare pieces of literature we have by a nineteenth-century woman which directly confronts the sexual politics of the male-female, husband-wife relationship” (Gilman 39).  The story created a new sphere for women to write about their mistreatments by men.  Hedges describes Gilman’s work as a feminist document that deals with sexual politics during a time when there were not very many writers who felt comfortable doing so.  The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper has been cast aside as an absurd woman who is unable to function without the help from a male doctor.  The male in this story is oppressing her very nature by keeping her locked away in a room, isolated from society and her child. She was not crazy until she went into the room; the rest cure is what made her lose touch with reality.  When the narrator was in confinement, she was not allowed to read or write, even though she snuck her diary when her husband wasn’t around. This was when she began to read the patterns of the wallpaper, thus finding her escape. Every detail of this story is covered in the subjugation of women’s thoughts and feelings.  The fact that she rises above her husband’s control over her life makes this a feminist text.    When Gilman describes John’s sister, Jennie, the housekeeper, she says, “She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession” (Gilman 17-8).  Gilman is in no way promoting these ideas of women being the lesser sex, she is merely pointing out that these were the ways women were conditioned to think and feel towards one another and their husbands.  She knew the ways in which women were portrayed in her time (and even today on a much smaller scale) and wanted to capitalize on that idea through this story. She wanted to teach women to stand up for themselves and spoke of these feminist ideals in her book, Women and Economics.

Elaine Hedges compares the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper to Gilman’s real life experience with the rest cure and her nearly permanent slip into psychosis, stating, “The heroine in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is destroyed…She has tried, in defiance of all social and medical codes of her time, to retain her sanity and her individuality. But the odds are against her and she fails. Charlotte Perkins Gilman did not fail” (Hedges 55).  While it is true that the narrator did go crazy, one may not be so quick to think that she failed in her attempts to retain her individuality. She did end up pulling the wallpaper off the wall at the end of the story and freeing herself from the prison her husband had placed her in.   Once she walks over his passed out body, it is as if she has finally conquered her husband.  To say that she was not able to retain her individuality may be putting too high a standard on this woman. She has just been in isolation for several weeks and has emerged, no matter how flawed and cracked, from the yellow wallpaper.

Mitchell’s rest cure was a way to promote the idea that women’s thoughts and activities should be monitored and controlled. Even if he thought that he was truly helping his patients, his remedy further proved how unimportant the feelings of women were to men during that time.  This also demonstrates how afraid men were of women’s ever growing sentiments and deliberations because if they were able to think and feel freely, they may choose to rebel against the expectations that were set for them.  The rest cure further shows that the treatment was not for the women as much as it was implemented so the men could maintain their power.  Gilman’s response to the rest cure, which was her successful attempt to pull herself back into reality and write The Yellow Wallpaper, was a way to promote feminist theory.  She wanted to show that the “same world exists for women as for men,” (Gilman 57) which is why she wrote the story along with many other articles.  Gilman’s bravery and persistence to come out of her depression and write a story that is still relevant in today’s society has given women throughout the past three centuries a voice and a belief in themselves.

Within The Yellow Wallpaper, there were elements of feminism that have been carried on throughout the years.  It was a tragic pit stop in the history of women that will hopefully never be repeated.  The rest cure, while it was not and has not ever been a wide spread form of restoration, acted as the inspiration for this particular feminist literary piece.  The implementation of the rest cure as a form of rehabilitation was the complete imprisonment of women.  It operated as a way for men to maintain their control over a woman’s every move by preying on her sanity and disguising their manipulation as concern for the woman’s well being.   The room with the yellow wallpaper was essentially Gilman’s way of portraying a prison, disguised to be a safe haven. The feminist theory is applied throughout the story. First, the reader is introduced to the asphyxiation that is the narrator’s life, then the narrator becomes enthralled with the design of her prison and in turn becomes violent when she can’t escape the pattern.  Lastly, she breaks free, not of her mind, but of the chokehold that the wallpaper has kept her in, thus releasing her from John’s influence.  Her mental break was her only escape.  It is sad to see that the only way for a woman to break free of domestic hell was insanity. Even though Gilman got out of her detainment mentally sound, the narrator in the story did not.  Women were, for so long, overlooked, and thought to be meaningless human beings, only put on this earth to satisfy men.  They did not have a voice until the feminist movement came along and gave them one.  All of the outrage that I feel is somehow overpowered by all of my gratitude for the feminist movement. Had it not been for them, who knows where women would be? Although we still have a long way to go in terms of the way society views us, we have definitely been heard.

Works Cited:

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. New England: Small, Maynard, Boston, 1899.

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper.” Forerunner (1913): n. pag. Web. 18 Nov 2009. <http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html>.

hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Massachusetts: South End Press, 1984.

Martin, Diane. “The Rest Cure Revisited.” American Journal of Psychiatry (2007): n. pag. Web.     18 Nov 2009. <http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/164/5/737>.

Pearce, J. “Silas Weir Mitchell and the “rest cure.”.” J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 75. (2004): 381. Web. 23 Nov 2009. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1738960/pdf/v075p00381.pdf>.

Professor DeVries

English 3150

19 November 2009

The Rest Cure and Feminist Theory in The Yellow Wallpaper

For centuries, women have been thought to be irrational creatures who allow their emotions to guide them through life, never using their intellect and thus, never being able to think logically. Women’s feelings have been negated, questioned, and believed by men to be a justification that women use to lose touch with reality.  Women really started to take back their voices through the use of feminist theory in early American literature.  One of the most important pieces of early American feminist thought was a short story called The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  The short story was influenced by Gilman’s own personal experiences with post partum depression and how she was wrongly diagnosed and put on a type of rehabilitation called rest cure, which is what the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is subjected to by her doctor husband, John. It was a brief, but important commentary on women’s health and emotions during a time when women were thought to be unfounded.  In this essay, I will talk about the psychosis and depression that the narrator went through because of the rest cure that was implemented for her post partum depression and how this relates to the feminist theory.

In the beginning of The Yellow Wallpaper, the reader is introduced to an oppressed situation through the narrator’s point of view towards her physician husband, John.  They have moved to a mansion for the summer, where the narrator is put in a prison type room that has bars on the windows, the bed is nailed to the floor, and scattered bits of yellow wallpaper that the narrator is repulsed by.  The room used to be a nursery, but now it has been turned into a rehabilitation area for the narrator to begin her recommended treatment, rest cure. The rest cure was an actual treatment that author Gilman was given after the birth of her child and her slip into depression. It was created by Silas Weir Mitchell and part of the reason why Gilman wrote The Yellow Wallpaper.    According to “The Rest Cure Revisited” by Diana Martin, M.D., Mitchell felt that, “‘healthy’ for women included strict limits on ‘brain work,’ which he felt imposed nervous strain and might interfere with ‘womanly duties.’  Mitchell felt that psychological manipulation and the need to keep the patient in a childlike submission was crucial to the rest cure’s ability to show results, which is what John, the narrator’s husband in the story did.  John is Gilman’s representation of her real life physician, Mitchell. The narrator begins to slip into a mental break, due to her lack of interaction with the outside world.  Gilman also mentions in an article called “Why I wrote ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’” that due to the rest cure, she almost had a complete mental ruin that was caused by her domesticated treatment and the ban on her creativity.  Unlike the narrator, Gilman learned that the rest cure was futile to her condition, which she also discovered was caused by post partum depression, and was able to escape before she became insane. 

The rest cure is a very interesting rehabilitation technique because it relies on the imprisonment of a young woman to treat a mental disease most often times associated with hysteria.  The rest cure’s main technique for treatment is isolation, bed rest, dieting and massage. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is not allowed to leave her room; her husband goes to such lengths as to put a locked gate that blocks the access to the stairs to keep her confined to her room.  He treats her as if she is a child and even refers to her as a little girl. When she gets out of bed one night to go and touch the wallpaper in her room, he awakens and asks her, “What is it, little girl?” Don’t go walking about like that-you’ll get cold” (23). When she tells him that she is not benefiting from her detainment and wishes she could be taken away, he brushes off her feelings, promoting the idea, once again, that women cannot be trusted to accurately describe their feelings. She suggests that she should be out of her room, interacting with people and learn to be a mother to her son and John tells her that she is getting much better due to the rest cure. The narrator explains that she is only getting worse from the segregation.   John doesn’t even give her the respect of talking directly to her when she addresses her case, saying, “Bless her little heart! She shall be as sick as she pleases!” (24). He believes that her condition has rendered her unable to think and function for herself and thus he believes he must watch over her and control her as one does with a child.   She begins to get very frustrated, but initially, she does not know where to direct her anger to. She believes her husband loves her and just wants what is best for her, so she begins to express her anger towards the yellow wallpaper, for being the decoration of her imprisonment.  Her frustration and fascination with the yellow wallpaper begins to pull her away from her actuality.

It is theorized that the narrator of this story experienced psychosis, which is defined as a loss of contact with reality. It is insinuated in the text that the woman’s psychosis may be in large part to post partum depression because she has recently given birth to a child that she explains makes her nervous to be around (14). Post partum depression can cause a person to have a mental break, not unlike the one that the narrator begins to experience through her stay in this room.  She starts off by having a small fascination with the wallpaper, saying, “I lie here on this great immovable bed-it is nailed down, I believe-and follow that pattern about the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we’ll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of conclusion” (19).  She describes how the longer she stays in the room, the more the wallpaper transforms, especially at night.  She begins to see a woman in the wallpaper, who she doesn’t know at first, is herself, which is a metaphor for the way she feels being stuck in this room without a companion or a creative task to entertain herself.  She notes that “The faint figure behind [the wallpaper] seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (23). The narrator becomes enthralled with the woman in the wallpaper and angry that she cannot grab a hold of her because the woman always moves whenever the narrator moves.  She starts to obsess over the hatred of the room because of the yellow wallpaper and the woman that she sees creeping around behind the pattern, trying desperately to escape the bars from the shadows.  The delusions that she is suffering from are manifestations of her own imprisonment. The woman she sees in the wall is none other than herself and the bars that the woman is behind is a representation of the confinement that her husband has put her in.   She decides that she must free the woman in the wallpaper and begins to strip off the remaining pieces off of the wall. She realizes that she has come out of the wallpaper once the wallpaper has been torn down. It is her tangible source for imprisonment and she has just broken free of it.  When her husband unlocks the door to see that she has pulled off the wallpaper, she replies, “I’ve got it at last, in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!” (36). Her husband faints in her path and she creeps over him, just like the woman she saw in the wallpaper.

Feminism is described as the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.  In bell hooks’ book called Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, she says, “Contemporary feminist movement in the United States called attention to the exploitation and oppression of women globally” (34).   It is undeniable that The Yellow Wallpaper is a feminist piece. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, herself, was famous feminist lecturer and writer and her story has been acclaimed as a literary masterpiece for what it stood for in regards to feminist thinking.  The story was rediscovered by feminist scholars in the 1970’s and thought the story showed the masculine assertion of power in the 19^th century of medical professions.  Elaine R. Hedges, an English professor at Towson State University, Maryland and also wrote pieces for the Feminist Press. Professor Hedges writes in her afterword of The Yellow Wallpaper, “For aside from the light it throws on the personal despairs, and the artistic triumph over them, of one of America’s foremost feminists, the story is one of the rare pieces of literature we have by a nineteenth-century woman which directly confronts the sexual politics of the male-female, husband-wife relationship” (39).  The story created a new sphere for women to write about their mistreatments by men.  Hedges describes Gilman’s work as a feminist document that deals with sexual politics during a time when there wasn’t very many writers who felt comfortable doing so.  The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper has been cast aside as a absurd woman who is unable to function without the help from a male doctor.  The male in this story is oppressing her very nature by keeping her locked away in a room, isolated from society and her child. She was not crazy until she went into the room; the rest cure is what made her lose touch with reality.  When the narrator was in confinement, she was not allowed to read or write, even though she snuck her diary when her husband wasn’t around, so she began to read the patterns of the wallpaper, thus finding her escape. Every detail of this story is covered in the subjugation of women’s thoughts and feelings.  The fact that she rises above her husband’s control over her life makes this a feminist text.  Gilman purposefully didn’t give the narrator a name in this story because it was her way of depicting society’s stereotype that all women were the same and were not in fact separate entities who each had unique emotions.  When Gilman describes John’s sister, Jennie, the housekeeper, she says, “She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession” (17, 18).  Gilman is in no way promoting these ideas of women being the lesser sex, she is merely pointing out that these were the ways that women were conditioned to think and feel towards one another and their husbands.  She knew the ways in which women were portrayed in her time and even today, on a much smaller scale and wanted to capitalize on that idea through this story. She wanted to teach women to stand up for themselves and spoke of these feminist ideals in her book, Women and Economics. 

 Elaine Hedges compares the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper to Gilman’s real life experience with the rest cure and her nearly permanent slip into psychosis, stating, “The heroine in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is destroyed…She has tried, in defiance of all social and medical codes of her time, to retain her sanity and her individuality. But the odds are against her and she fails. Charlotte Perkins Gilman did not fail” (55).  While it is true that the narrator did go crazy, one may not be so quick to think that she failed in her attempts to retain her individuality. She did end up pulling the wallpaper off the wall at the end of the story and freeing herself from the prison that her husband had placed her in.   Once she walks over his passed out body, it’s as if she has finally conquered her husband. So to say that she was not able to retain her individuality may be putting too high a standard on this woman. She has just been in isolation for several weeks and has emerged, no matter how flawed and cracked, from the yellow wallpaper.

Mitchell’s rest cure was a way to promote the idea that women’s thoughts and activities should be monitored and controlled. Even if he thought that he was truly helping his patients, his remedy further proved how unimportant the feelings of women were to men during that time and also how afraid men were of women’s ever growing sentiments and deliberations because if they were able to think and feel freely, they may choose to rebel against the expectations that were set for them.  The rest cure further shows that the treatment wasn’t for the women as much as it was implemented so that the men could maintain their power.  Gilman’s response to the rest cure, which was her successful attempt to pull herself back into reality and write The Yellow Wallpaper, was a way to promote feminist theory.  She wanted to show that “same world exists for women as for men,” (57) which is why she wrote the story along with many other articles.  Gilman’s bravery and persistence to come out of her depression and write a story that is still relevant in today’s society has given women throughout the past three centuries a voice and a belief in themselves. 

Works Cited

Hedges, Elaine R. Afterword. The Yellow Wallpaper. By Charlotte Perkins Gilman. New England: Small, Maynard, Boston, 1899.

hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Massachusetts: South End Press, 1984.

Martin, Diane. “The Rest Cure Revisited.” Virginia: American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc., 2007.  http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/164/5/737. May 2007. American Journal of Psychiatry, November 18, 2009<URL>.

Pearce, J. Silas Weir Mitchell and the “rest cure.” UK: J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry, 2004.  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1738960/pdf/v075p00381.pdf. March 2004. November 17, 2009<URL>

My intent for my media/literature remix project was to show the amazing amounts of work that went into making Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog. I wanted to show behind the scenes pictures of the cast and crew, while playing various songs from the webisode, including “Freeze Ray.”  I liked the fact that the song “Freeze Ray” went well together with the still shots of the cast and crew, showing moments frozen in time.  It was really important to see the work that went into making this webisode and to see the massive following that came out of it, which is why I included pictures from ComiCon, the fans dressed as Dr. Horrible, and the theatre where the webisode was screened on Halloween.  I chose to put the hilarious video of Dr. Horrible crashing the Emmy Awards Show as my closing sequence because I really liked what he had to say about web media taking over television, even if it was supposed to be a parody. Joss Whedon is notorious for doing comical bits that act as social commentary.

Though “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Awakening” are two different types of feminist text, they are relatable in that they both share the common foundation of being about two women who are trying to make sense of the world around them while their husbands try to stifle their minds and their emotions.  Elizabeth Lee writes in her article, Feminist Theory: An Overview, “The female experience, then, began to take on positive affirmations. The Female Aesthetic arose — expressing a unique female consciousness and a feminine tradition in literature — as it celebrated an intuitive female approach in the interpretation of women’s texts. It “spoke of a vanished nation, a lost motherland; of female vernacular or Mother Tongue; and of a powerful but neglected women’s culture” (1996).

I really enjoyed the way that Crowley writes and the descriptions of Greece. His webs that he intricately weaves between Greece and Scotland is incredible. Reading this short story made me interested in Crowley’s other works along with the life of Lord Byron and I feel that in order to give an accurate analysis on the story, I am going to have to read some of his other stories.

The distribution of media and literature has definitely changed over the course of the years. There have been newspapers, talk radio, magazines, electronic journals, news websites, blogs, e-books, and most recently webisodes, which are short audio or video presentations on an Internet site.  Joss Whedon has become an integral part of this new found web media with his brilliant release of Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog, which he released in July 2008 during the writers’ strike. While there have been a few other web shows, Dr. Horrible’s is among the widest spread of the bunch, with it’s high quality look, small budget, massive internet following, and big time awards . The production was small, but the aim was immeasurable.

Joss Whedon first had the idea to create Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog during the Writer’s Guild of America strike.  He wanted to create something inexpensive, while making it look professionally done. Whedon wanted to show that Internet content could take off and be a success without the help of a studio to back the production up. He felt that by doing something like Internet content, it would be more efficient than protesting.  He, along with his brother’s and sister in law teamed up to write the concept behind the genius that is Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog. They enlisted the help of actors Nathan Fillion, Felicia Day, and Neil Patrick Harris to make up the three main characters. Dr. Horrible, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is a wannabe supervillian who is trying to get into the Evil League of Evil.  He’s in love with Penny, played by Felicia Day, whose affections are aimed at the corrupt superhero, Captain Hammer, played by Nathan Fillion. The concept was a metaphorical piece about the extreme cataclysm that was affecting the media during the time of the strike, set in a completely unrealistic science fiction world.

Whedon knew that the only way to get the production done in the way that he wanted to was to do it himself without the help of a big studio’s name added to it.  Many studio executives didn’t think it would be possible to do during a time when television shows and movies were at a standstill and efforts were focused on protest, not production. It is fair to infer that most studio executives also didn’t think that something could get done successfully without the help of big writers and a team of producers to get the ball rolling.  Hollywood executives didn’t know that the internet was slowly becoming this new-fangled outlet for creativity or they would have realized that Whedon’s ideas were those of a complete creative genius.  He knew that the idea would be picked up quickly by viewers because he knew how big the world of online media was slowly becoming

Once the pre-production was under way, the writers’ strike ended and the actors and crew, Joss Whedon, whose show, Dollhouse, was set to air its pilot, had to start working again. The actors and the creators didn’t let this discourage them. They worked on Dr. Horrible between their other jobs and within a span of a six day shoot, production was finished. The production of this project was funded by Whedon, alone, with the cost reaching just about $200,000. The actors weren’t paid in the beginning, a detail that none of them minded, because they knew that they were a part of a bigger concept that could possibly take the Internet world by storm.

Whedon’s plan was to find a spot where the show could be released and he would be able to repay his cast and crew and also earn his money back.  Hulu.com, an internet website similar to YouTube was the place.   The webisode was released for free online, one act per day, with a promise of an iTunes release date.  The first act was released on July 15, 2008 and the other two followed. By July 20, 2008, all the episodes were taken offline, but re-released on July 28, 2008.  The following was incredible, with over 2.2 million viewers in the first week. By the time the third act came out, viewers were on the edge of their computer chairs waiting for the iTunes release.  On December 19, 2008, the DVD was released entirely on popular shopping site, Amazon.com and became one of the most top selling DVD’s by January 2009.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog has done pretty well for itself. It has won a People’s Choice Award for “Favorite Online Sensation.” It also won seven awards at the 2009 Streamy Awards, including: Audience Choice Award for Best Web Series, Best Directing for a Comedy Web Series, Best Writing for a Comedy Web Series and Best Original Music.   The success of this particular web media has really made waves in terms of the future of entertainment.  Felicia Day, who played Penny in the webisode, said in an interview for entertainment weekly, “I think there are a lot of the things that Hollywood doesn’t understand about the Internet. It’s kind of the reverse of mainstream media: You don’t want to aim for everybody. You want to aim for a targeted audience, and then from there, that passionate audience is going to spread the word. It’s a different approach to creating something for the Internet, and clearly, Joss’s got it.  Dr. Horrible was all word-of-mouth” (EW.com pg. 6). Actors, producers, writers, and those who viewers were already passionate about the writers’ strike and wanted an outlet to vent their frustrations. The creation of Dr. Horrible was a way for these people to expel their annoyance that they may have had because of the early retirement of their favorite network shows.  It was also a way for them to dive into a dream world with a moral foundation.  The intent of this creation was not to make a lot of money in a short amount of time, but rather to have it build slowly over time and continue to be relative in the years to come.  Viewers have made these dreams of Whedon’s that were once just ideas, come to life.

The circulation of media and literature through Internet content has become a way of life for a lot of people.  It’s not to say that print and DVD’s are obsolete, rather, that viewing movies, reading newspaper articles or blogs, and especially dispensing one’s own creative work is more convenient via the internet.  The internet has a way of getting large quantities of people involved without ever having to leave ones home, which is appealing to many.  By viewing Dr. Horrible at home on some idle Tuesday afternoon, the distribution of Whedon’s project was increasing. The increase was so great that by the early hours of Wednesday morning on July 16, 2008, the hosting site for the show had crashed and people were in frenzy. When the crash hit, the server was averaging 200,000 views per hour.  Everyone wanted to watch this incredible surprise of a musical and were very unhappy when its massive popularity made it impossible for them to do so.  Eventually, the site was up and running again and all was right in the world of Dr. Horrible fans.

The amount of followers of Internet content is absolutely incredible. Not to mention how many of those who do read all of their literature and media online in an effort to go green.  There’s no denying that there is a trend that has been going on for years in the direction of online mediums and that the future for creativity seems to be headed in that direction as well.

The uniqueness behind Dr. Horrible’s stems from the fact that Whedon and his family are the ones who own the complete rights to the webisode and are in complete control of it.  Also, supporters of the indie hit are the ones responsible for getting it recognized as they are the people who continue to view it and spread the word about it. Felicia Day spoke in an interview about Dr. Horrible’s distinctiveness, saying “[the] indie spirit that Dr. Horrible had, where people feel like they are participating in its success, is so unique.”  In the world of film and music production, oftentimes there are a bunch of people who get paid and who own parts of the project. The appeal of web media is that one person can be solely responsible for his or her own work and also for the amount of attention that it receives. You don’t have to know a big time movie executive or intern in Hollywood for a chance to have web content, it’s accessible for everyone. Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog has definitely shown people this fact.

While there is still a home for print journalism, CD’s, DVD’s, and books, there is definitely a new space that has been made for internet content. Any type of news, literature, or media entertainment that one wants to know about or read about is right at their hands, which is a definite advantage.  The bargain that one gets with internet content definitely has its appeal, especially with the cost of day to day needs as high as they are now. While the gate was already cracked before Joss Whedon created Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog,  he opened the door wide and set the standard higher than ever before.  The world of web media can only get better from here.