I found today’s reading and podcast both very interesting. The idea of close reading is something that I have learned over and over again, both in high school and in college, but Dr.Bezios podcast really laid out all the different steps and questions you have to think about while close reading to really understand what the text is saying. Discussing the use of symbols in these close readings was also interesting to me. When I am personally any sort of article or book or literature, I never think about the words being symbols themselves; I think of the context of the words being a symbol to mean something else, such as the lion meaning courage example. This is why when Dr.Bezio described that even the word “cat”, the combination of the letters c-a-t is just a signifier for a creature, the animal of a cat, and how this can be a sign/symbol was a really interesting concept to me, and makes me think about different readings I have done over the years and makes me realize how much more complex words truly are. Even Dr.Bezios analysis of the word “sword” meaning violence, kingship, masculinity, etc, and then switching just one letter makes a whole new sign, a whole new symbol and a way to understand the context of the word. This paragraph became kind of a rant, but I found this idea of the complexity of words when close reading to be really interesting and something that I have not close read too deeply on. 

Now thinking about the second part of the podcast and the reading, I’ve read this story before for a class I believe in high school or early in college (I can’t remember when I read it but I remember seeing it), but I never learned about the background to the story. It was really interesting to understand that the story was a response to the author’s own rest cure treatment and seemingly going a bit crazy from it. This is really evident from the story that she goes through spurts of depression and her mental health getting worse and worse as time and the story goes on, seeming almost to the point of delusion and her mind being so warped and distorted. I think the wallpaper not only represents her feeling of being trapped, but her lack of a way to escape both her own mental illness and the opinions and views of her husband/doctor who are not caring for her  enough. There is a lot of talk about not only the color of the wallpaper, but the smell that goes with it, and that even when she goes “for a ride”, she feels like she can still smell that room, now associating the color yellow with that particular smell, almost as if its stained in her mind (that experienced is stained in her mind) and she cannot escape it. The context and background around the time period of this story makes its so much more real; a time that women were told they have “female hysteria”, and people not believing their mental health issues, making the symbolism of the room she is trapped in and the wallpaper surrounding her that much more significant and impactful to the reader, making it evident how important close reading of this story is in order to fully understand the impact of it to both the author and others during this time period.