To give credit where its due, W. Somerset Maugham is exceedingly good at exposing human foibles and hypocrisy. Here it is the ugliness of misplaced anTo give credit where its due, W. Somerset Maugham is exceedingly good at exposing human foibles and hypocrisy. Here it is the ugliness of misplaced and excessive missionary zeal and the leanings toward cruelty and violence that often accompanies forms of fanaticism, that come under fire.
This is the best of his short stories that I have read so far. Unmarred by the complicated niggles of many of his other 'travel' stories, this story has a purity of form that simply elevates it to a classic....more
I almost gave this collection a 1 star because of the casual as well as intentional racism. The stories are written in the third person, which might dI almost gave this collection a 1 star because of the casual as well as intentional racism. The stories are written in the third person, which might divest the author of responsibility for the character's attitudes, but then if the narrator uses racist language, one knows this belongs to the author and not to a character.
I was, for example, not sure what Maugham was referring to when he kept calling the peoples native of the thinly-disguised Malaysian countries that the stories are set in (why give the countries or states different names � so that it would be less obvious how little Maugham knew about them?) "boy" and "boys", but it sounded like he was referring to servants, of which at least two or three of them must for various reasons have been adults, and the head of these servants, Maugham refers to as "the head boy". Therefore, one can only come to the conclusion that Maugham is not referring to literal children, but that this must surely be an instance of infantilising those whom you seek to subjugate.
The author was obviously set against interracial relationships, and especially against interracial sexual relations, with his reason being the institutional racism of the British, (and this he sometimes describes to the finest details in the most nauseating terms). Besides this, his characters are always bemoaning the lack of company of "other white men", and never do any of the colonial administrators who are the objects of his stories, mix with any of Malaysia's varied ethnicities, it would seem because they're all "boys" and "n***ers" after all. How could such be of any value other than that of a servant?
...but my beef goes deeper than that. The collection is ostensibly about Malaysia, but actually, beyond mentioning that it is lovely, green and sunny, there is extremely little about Malaysia in it. A word or two is said about the geography and weather, but no deeper descriptions, of, for example, the fauna and flora, or anything really about the country, its industry, its culture, its religious practices, its population, or anything that might set any aspect of it apart. It could have been set anywhere; -could have been a British colony on an alien planet, and in fact, the first story actually takes place in England.
Whatever is told about the indigenous peoples and their customs are skin deep and could have been gleaned by anybody visiting the place for a day or two. Where Maugham does refer to a case of a shamanistic "hex" he confuses the Malaysian shamanistic tradition with "voodoo", (he calls it voodoo), the latter which derived from West-Africa and which lives on as "Santeria" in the American South and in the Caribbean, and not, as far as I can tell, in Southeast Asia, though I do stand to be corrected on that.
...but hey, the colonies are the colonies, who cares where they are, Africa, Asia, they're all the same, and all of them "n***ers", as one of the characters in these stories put it.
Pretty much all the stories deal with the ups and downs (mostly downs, literally to the point of insanity and murder) of British Colonials, and their little foibles and snobbishnesses. The fact that these were portrayed rather entertainingly, is what brought my star rating up from a 1 to a 2.
I'd read a lot of Maugham's works when I was very young, and at the time I was impressed enough with them to have counted myself as a Somerset Maugham fan.
However, after having read this collection, I suddenly became very unsure of my opinion of Maugham. I count quite a few oriental people as my friends, and I have visited the Far East, and for me this collection of stories appeared grey and featureless as well as being purely centred on the British presence, complete with the typical colonial outlook that had made Britain so unpopular in its colonies.
I literally felt as if I was watching a 1920's black and white movie in my mind's eye, which contrasts so greatly with my own experiences of the Far East, that I feel I need to do a complete revision of my opinion of Maugham. I have no qualms with the fact that he is an entertaining writer- that he certainly is; but he seems to me in this collection of stories quite solipsistic in his Britishness.
I shall be re-reading many of the books he wrote that are not set in "The West", to see what I think of them now, as my present day self!...more
Disturbometer: 8-9 out of 10 One of the entries in my “list of most disturbing short stories ever�, which I am thankfully almost at the end of. ========Disturbometer: 8-9 out of 10 One of the entries in my “list of most disturbing short stories ever�, which I am thankfully almost at the end of. ==================== [image]
In a way, writers of dark fiction hem themselves in to a large extent. People who are familiar with their work, come to expect horror from them, and so their reputation tends to blunt the effect of the horror they attempt to inflict on their readers. So my disturbometer rating doesn’t mean that nothing awful happens in this story � something awful certainly does happen. And, as with many of Poe’s tales, the biggest horror lies in the twisted mind of the narrator.
EDIT (Dec. 23 2021) : Taking the paragraph above in mind, in the comment section below, GR friend linked to a song on Youtube named The Cask of Amontillado, by The Alan Parsons Project.
That song kind of extracted the bare essence of this story for me: (view spoiler)[ One friend is killing another, in a truly horrible way, because of his own piqued feelings and sense of being wronged, along with a healthy dose of jealousy regarding the friends wealth, happiness and good fortune. The story doesn't quite tell us if Fortunato got his good fortune at Montresor's (the killer narrator's) expense. But what we DO get from the story, is the manner of Fortunato's murder, the modus operandi - right from the moment that he is unsuspectingly led into the catacombs under a false pretext and with a scary amount of guile, to the point that he is trapped - and immured forever. (hide spoiler)] Fortunato might not have been a very nice person himself, and that much the story does make clear, but it needed the song for me to realize the full horror that Fortunato must have experienced at the end, and caused me to up my disturbometer from 7 to 8-9.
Regarding the narrator, one has to ask yourself what kind of person smiles and fusses over a person that they are purposely leading to an extremely unpleasant death? What kind of person feels hatred for another person, but yet expresses friendship and concern towards that person? An extremely twisted and a pretty creepy kind of person, that’s for sure. So once again, as is often found in Poe's works, we have an unsympathetic protagonist.
The story takes place during an Italian carnival, so there are crowds on the streets, wearing costumes and masks while drinking and merrymaking, which adds a lurid, unreal quality to the background setting of the tale.
The story takes a sinister turn when our narrator, on the pretext of judging the quality of a casket of Amontillado*, leads his inebriated friend into the catacombs of the Montresor family mausoleum, where, as was the custom in ye olden days, the bodies of the dead were placed, usually in caskets, into niches made in the walls. But the wood of caskets can get old and rot in the damp, thereby partly or wholly exposing its morbid contents. So it's a suitably macabre setting, with skeletons serving as silent witnesses to the proceedings. Said proceedings being, Montresor taking truly diabolical revenge on his so-called friend, Fortunato. (Read the story to find out exactly how - it's very short.)
As part of my edit after hearing and watching the song on Youtube, I've also reflected on what Montresor was figuratively doing to Fortunato. He was basically removing Fortunato from sight completely, and was in a very literal way, removing him from society, blocking him from stealing Montresor's "shine", and removing him from the scene both literally and figuratively. Did that work out for Montresor? Well, it is hinted at that Montresor might have had his regrets after all, but as with all unreliable narrators, one never knows.
In my first reflections upon this story, I was thinking: “Ha, Poe has set a story of revenge in a land ripe with vengeance, the land that spawned the Mafia, an organization that receives its power from the threat of revenge." But then, revenge is also generally speaking a very Latin thing, isn’t it? The Spanish are culturally very much into revenge as well, and here my mind moved to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a tale about a revenge in defense of an honor system that was so culturally ingrained, that bloody, deadly revenge was the expected thing when the honor of a family was sullied according to the norms of that culture.
‘Honor� (which is a culturally contextual thing) was also very popularly 'defended� by having duels, not just by the Spanish, but by Europeans of all stripes in the early nineteenth, the eighteenth, and earlier centuries, and honor, especially family honor, was a legitimate thing to defend to the death not just in Europe/Russia, but in the Middle-East as well. Ok, so notions of ‘honor� and revenge is a pretty universal occurrence, especially in patriarchal settings.
Be that as it may, many writers like to set their tales of “revenge in order to defend the family honor� in Italy � as did Shakespeare with his tragic Romeo and Juliet, and Guy de Maupassant with his story “A Vendetta�. And so it is with The Casque of Amontillado. We are never explicitly told why the narrator wants to take revenge, beyond hints that personal pride and possibly family honor is involved.
The narrator, a member of the Montresor family, which was once rich and illustrious, but had in the meantime fallen from grace, says to his ‘friend� Fortunato : “You are rich, respected, admired, beloved; you are happy, as once I was.� This seems to hint at the idea that the narrator somehow blames Fortunato for his current lack of happiness � whether it be by direct or even only implied insult. But we never get to know the exact nature of this insult, and it is implied that Fortunato, an arrogant big-mouth, already knows the reason, since he never asks why he is being punished, but seems to automatically grasp, finally, at the end, that this is what is happening.
Another hint that this revenge might be inspired by defending family honor, is that the family crest of the Montresors features a foot trampling on a snake which is biting the same foot in the heel, with the motto: No one can harm me unpunished.
I’ve seen suggestions that Poe wrote this tale as a ‘revenge� tale against another writer who lampooned Poe and made fun of him. If this were true, it certainly then makes sense that Poe would leave the exact nature of the insult over to the imagination.
However it may be, as usual, Poe doesn’t spoonfeed us on all of the details � he makes subtle hints and leaves the reader to sweat it out as to exactly what is going on. For all we know, this narrator, as seems to be the case with a few of his other narrators, may also be insane. I read the story as a part of a Poe collection named Tales of Mystery and Imagination, and yes, mystery there is aplenty.
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*Amontillado is a variety of sherry wine characterized by being darker than fino but lighter than oloroso. It is named after the Montilla region of Spain, where the style originated in the 18th century, although the name "Amontillado" is sometimes used commercially as a simple measure of colour to label any sherry lying between a fino and an oloroso.
Some sources say a 'pipe' of Amontillado, would be a huge round wooden casket of about 130 gallons, or 492 liters containing the wine, other sources say a pipe can vary from 350 to over 600 liters. It seems partly to have varied over time, in the past 200 years or so. I suppose it also varies from region to region. It's one of those big caskets that you tend to see in wine cellars, in any case....more
One of the entries in my "most disturbing story ever" series.
This story, written in 1967, immediately made me think of PrometDisturbometer 5 out of 10
One of the entries in my "most disturbing story ever" series.
This story, written in 1967, immediately made me think of Prometheus, the Titan from ancient Greek mythology, who, as his punishment for giving fire to humans and thereby also giving them technology, was sentenced by Zeus to be tied (or nailed) to a mountain where a huge eagle (the emblem of Zeus) would come and eat his liver every day, which would regrow just to be eaten by the eagle again the next day, on and on into eternity. For the ancient Greeks, instead of the heart, the liver was the seat of human emotion, so yeah, interesting mode of torture.
My musing on Prometheus makes me wonder if Ellison didn’t perhaps take some inspiration from the story of Prometheus, and here, I am afraid, I will be adding some SPOILERS, so if you’re fanatical about spoilers, read the story quickly and come back. It’s really an extremely quick read, available on the internet in various places.
In any case, my ponderings about the story’s similarity to the story of Prometheus, are as follows:
1. Prometheus steals some fire from the gods, and gives it to the humans, thereby giving agency and power to the humans, also allowing them to war on one another.
1. Humans initially (in real life) developed computers to further science and commerce. Oops, there’s a huge sidenote coming up here:
In the story, a huge computer that had been built for the purposes of war, suddenly becomes sentient, and erm, I guess, since it was programmed to destroy, it destroys the entire human race, just like that, with "killing data", but keeps five humans alive, in order to have some evil fun torturing them into eternity. Apparently this computer can keep running into eternity, and he can also keep organic life such as these five humans alive indefinitely. The narrator, one of those humans, says: �And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he (the computer) had sought revenge.�
Wait..-what? So apparently machines are always terribly angry for having been created? That's rather strange logic. I wonder why, if a machine could be upset, why that anger would revolve around the fact of its creation? Ok, whatever, just go with it as a sort of "horror-story" premise. I guess in horror stories, machines are always rageful, evil, etc.
But in actual fact, computers have been around for many years. Abacus-like devices were used in Babylonia as far back as 2400 BC already. So, initially, “computers� were used for counting and arithmetic tasks. No records of angry counting machines have ever been found. Fast forward a bit from purely mechanical machines, to the 20th century.
During the first half of the 20th century, increasingly sophisticated non-programmable analog computers were built, to be used used for computation to aid in commerce, record-keeping and science. Fast-forward past the first mainframe computers which used punch-tape and punch cards in the 1940’s and 50’s, to the more powerful machines built after the Korean war - the computers of the late fifties and early sixties, which would be the computers that the author was familiar with. Keep in mind that in those days, the idea of having your own PC was quite inconceivable.
Since the story was written circa 1967, I reckon one would need to look at the machines of the time period to get an idea of where Ellison was coming from, because his idea of what a computer is and what it can do, is obviously quite fantastical � I mean, a computer can’t really swallow living things as the antagonist - the huge computer named AM, does in the story - it somehow internalizes the five people that it tortures, and computers can't really, as in the story, encompass the entire world, (in the 1995 game of the same name, the environment inside the computer consists of simulations, which makes more sense technologically speaking) unless, of course, it’s the internet, and perhaps Ellison’s sentient computer was composed a bit similar to the way that the internet is, since he does hint at "a linkage" when he says:
� It became a big war, a very complex war, so they needed the computers to handle it. They sank the first shafts and began building AM. There was the Chinese AM and the Russian AM and the Yankee AM and everything was fine until they had honeycombed the entire planet, adding on this element and that element. But one day AM woke up and knew who he was, and he linked himself, and he began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead, �
Now, to give you an idea of what the author is talking about � he is actually not really talking about the internet � when he says �They sank the first shafts and began building AM�, he means literally a humongous, enormous mainframe. The internet as we know it, in other words, computers being linked to one another remotely, was a project started as the "ARPANET" in 1966, basically at the time that the story was being written, and the first computer linkages only started in 1969, after the story was written and had received it's 1968 Hugo award. So at the time the story was written, the internet was still only ideas on a chalk board.
To give a bit more context on how people from an age gone by viewed computers, the big thing to remember is that computers, due to IT tech still being in its infancy, were large and expensive to build. The first mainframe computer was the Harvard Mark I. Developed starting in the 1930s, the machine was not ready for use until 1943. It weighed five tons, filled an entire room and cost about $200,000 to build � which is something like $3,070,500 in 2021 dollars. It weighed 5 tons! That’s ginormous! And guess what, that huge thing could practically speaking do less than one operation per second, and had no memory or storage in the sense that we think of it today.
So no wonder Ellison thought that a computer of huge dimensions would have to be built in order for it to attain artificial intelligence. We have not managed to build computers yet that are sentient and that has self-consciousness in the same way that humans have it, although AI has come amazingly far. And as for the concentration of computing power, a mid - to top range smartphone today could have launched and managed the first moon landing. As for a comparison of today’s supercomputers compared to the supercomputers available when Ellison wrote the story:
The world's current top supercomputer can perform 442 trillion (million million) operations per second and has a memory capacity of somewhere around 3PB (three million megabytes).
On the other hand, a high-performance computer of the mid-1960s, the IBM System/360, could perform 16 million operations per second and had a memory capacity of eight megabytes. There’s almost no comparison�
There was a 1995 game made of the same name for which the author of the story wrote the script- and I must say that to me (I played the game) the game was far better than the story, not just in the sense of its understanding of technology, but also because of the fact that in the game, AM "punishes" the characters by constructing metaphorical adventures based on each character's fatal flaws. So there the "punishments" make more sense, and the scenario is less nihilistic than in the short story of 1967.
So for me one of the big flaws of the story (vs the game), is that I can’t see why the machine should have been angry and vengeful for having been built � perhaps because this specific one � the supercomputer in the story’s name is AM � perhaps AM is angry because he had been built for the purpose of war? That’s almost like saying fire got angry because it was used for the purpose of war � but then fire couldn’t achieve sentience, and AM did. It was “the gods� who got angry in the Prometheus story, and it was the instrument of war that got angry in AM’s story.
Ok, perhaps my Prometheus comparison isn’t working so well, but there –is- a huge eagle in the story. However, it doesn’t eat any livers or hearts, so maybe not the same eagle, hmm?
I don’t know, I’m trying to make the story work on some level� I mean, the internet-like feel of when the three supercomputers link up is rather prescient. But the idea that “one day a computer can just wake up and have sentience� is not at all how machine learning works. As to the idea that computers can be taught to simulate emotions, that is possible, but WHY would you program a computer that had been built for a practical, logistical purpose to have emotions? Imagine they start selling us microwaves or cars that have emotions!� anyway, best to view this story as pure fantasy rather than anything else.
There were a few things other than the internal logic of the story that bothered me a bit, which is probably partially due to the culture of the time, for example:
I felt a bit disturbed that Ellison seems to think gay men must per se have small penises. What on earth does sexual orientation have to do with the size of your genitals? Imagine if when babies are born, you were to say: Hmm, this little boy has a small penis, so he’s onto the gay pile. Oooh, that baby has a huge one, he’s definitely straight! I suppose boys with medium penises are, by that logic, bi? ...more
Another entry from the “most disturbing story� list.
"Guts" is a story out of Chuck Palahnuik's collection-of-stories-inDisturbometer: 9 - 10 out of 10
Another entry from the “most disturbing story� list.
"Guts" is a story out of Chuck Palahnuik's collection-of-stories-in-the-form-of-a-novel, Haunted.
Well. At this point in my exploration of the “most disturbing story ever�, I was starting to feel a bit weary of my quest. Many modern writers, it seems, play on yuckiness, gore and extreme and explicit violence to pull readers out of their comfort zone; they try to ride on the coattails of it being “shocking� rather than to write a well-crafted story, like most of the older “disturbing� stories that I’d read were.
Maybe it’s also a question of that only the well-written stories remain through time, while cheap smut tends to fall by the wayside? Is this story “cheap smut�? Weelll, it’s more like stories that modern boys would tell around a campfire. When I started off reading it, I was actually laughing and shaking my head, thinking: “Seriously? Is this supposed to gross me out?� It was like one of those “medical stories� of “things that went wrong� that some popular Youtubers tell. You know the kind? Like: “This woman ate 500 pears. See what happened to her pancreas.� or “This man drank 40 beers a day for 3 years. See what it did to his brain.� Only, to add to the adolescent boy appeal of this particular story, it was like: “This boy did X to have better orgasms while jacking off. See what happened to his X.�
So, I’m not quite sure how much writing skill goes into recounting medical horror stories. But I will tell you this � I’m not sure if the last story at the end was made-up or at least partly based on the truth, but Palahnuik –did- manage to make it very realistic. Extremely realistic. TOO realistic! I will own up to feeling, like certain British grandmothers would call it: “a bit queer� towards the end. And by that I don’t mean to say anything about my sexuality or that it had anything to do with gayness. In fact, I felt far from gay, I felt gray. I might even have felt a bit dizzy for a moment. I waited a bit before getting up after reading it. Yes, yes, I will admit to that. But I’m still not convinced that it means the entire story is well written. I’ll just say that I found Fight Club far better, and that Fight Club also made me feel less ill....more
Disturbometer: 8 out of 10. One of the entries in my "Most disturbing stories" list.
Since this is already a well-known story that most of my friends haDisturbometer: 8 out of 10. One of the entries in my "Most disturbing stories" list.
Since this is already a well-known story that most of my friends have read, I’m not going to worry about spoilers and this will be more a discussion than a “review�.
‘The Yellow Wallpaper� as a story is certainly disturbing in its own right, but is even more disturbing when viewed within its frame of the ignorance of mental health concerns extant in the late Victorian era. This ignorance, coupled with the systemic subjugation of women (especially the notion that women were too weak to handle any kind of intellectual stimuli or effort) exacerbated the woman in the story’s descent into madness. Tracing the progress of the gradual disintegration of a human mind over time is by itself extremely uncomfortable, but the reasons behind the protagonist’s “madness� and her society’s views on mental health adds an additional layer of concern.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman used to be a well-known name in intellectual circles in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She was a prominent sociologist and feminist, who had published works on sociology, economics and other subjects � her most famous non-fiction work being Women and Economics. She also wrote the famous �The Herland Trilogy: Moving the Mountain, Herland, with Her in Ourland� trilogy of novels in which she argues for a more equal role for women in work and society in general.
But Gilman was a deeply flawed person. Criticized for her racism and her seeming rejection of the maternal role in society, Gilman also suffered from mental illness, possibly something as innocuous as peripartum depression, but at the time (1892), any woman who didn’t conform to societal norms, was diagnosed as having “hysteria� or “neurasthenia�. (Note that ‘hysteria� was a condition reserved exclusively for women. No man was ever pronounced as ‘hysterical� � just think of the word, and you immediately assume its origin to be female. )
Gilman had had a particularly difficult childhood. Her father abandoned the family shortly after her birth, an event which severely scarred both herself and her mother. Her mother never stopped longing for her departed husband, and subconsciously punished Charlotte by making a decision never to show her any love or affection, on the surface with the excuse of not wanting her to get used to love, since in the mother’s eyes, love and affection was a thing to be lost later in life, and it was apparently better not to “spoil� a child into expecting love or affection in life. Due to a dependency on extended family members, the little family consisting of Gilman, her mother and her brother, lived in poverty and moved often, thereby adding the deprivation of comfort and security to the lack of affection that Gilman already suffered.
The mother’s attempted prophylaxis against “wanting love� had not worked on Charlotte, though. Instead it left her even more needy for love, but so scarred that she couldn’t adjust to the idea of having a normal loving family, which was in her worldview as a young woman, the only ‘ticket� for love. Love and affection was not attainable if you did not marry and have children, and Charlotte badly needed affection, so she did marry and fell pregnant.
But once Charlotte's daughter Katherine was born, it created severe cognitive dissonance, because wasn’t this the exact-same situation that Charlotte’s mother had gotten herself into � a situation which had destroyed not only the mother’s life, but the life of Charlotte, her child, as well? Once Charlotte’s mother had given birth to her, their lives fell apart, and due to her mother’s continued love for her father, the father was not seen as the villain in the story, but was doing what (from Charlotte's skewed viewpoint), fathers do when mothers have babies. They leave, and everything falls apart. Pretty confusing for poor Charlotte as a child, and a source of suppressed anxiety and confusion for the now adult Charlotte, triggering anxiety and depression to an unbearable degree.
Eventually Charlotte, just like her father had done with his family, left her first husband, and left her daughter, Katherine, in the care of one of her friends who was later to become her first husband's wife. Yes, I know that's a bit confusing. Basically it was one big mess. Bottom line was that motherhood really didn't agree with Charlotte.
Be that as it may, it’s very likely that Charlotte clinically suffered from peripartum depression after the birth of her daughter Katherine. According to the American Psychiatric Association, about one in seven women experience peripartum depression, which is a condition far worse than just the “baby blues.� Baby blues may include crying for no reason, irritability, restlessness, and anxiety, which resolves by itself after a week or two.
Peripartum depression can last for months, and can include symptoms such as: feeling sad or having a depressed mood; loss of interest or pleasure in activities once enjoyed; changes in appetite; trouble sleeping or sleeping too much; loss of energy or increased fatigue, increase in purposeless physical activity (e.g., pacing, handwringing) or slowed movements or speech; feeling worthless or guilty; difficulty thinking, concentrating, or making decisions; thoughts of death or suicide; crying for “no reason�; lack of interest in the baby, not feeling bonded to the baby, or feeling very anxious about/around the baby; feelings of being a bad mother; fear of harming the baby or oneself, as well as suffering from anxiety.
The real Charlotte, the author, experienced most of these symptoms after having her baby, but was diagnosed as having “neurasthenia�. I must say, that before reading any background at all on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, purely while reading the Yellow Wallpaper story, I was already reminded of Virginia Woolf; I had read before how Virginia was treated for her depression and anxiety (also called hysteria and neurasthenia, as in Gilman’s case) with “the rest cure�, which seemed awfully similar to what the protagonist in the story was being subjected to by her physician husband.
A note here on the effects of solitary confinement � which is basically what is being done to the protagonist: Over time, the stress of being isolated can cause a range of mental health problems. According to Dr. Sharon Shalev, who authored A Sourcebook on Solitary Confinement in 2008, these problems may include: anxiety and stress, depression and hopelessness, anger, irritability, and hostility. panic attacks, worsened preexisting mental health issues, hypersensitivity to sounds and smells, problems with attention, concentration, and memory, hallucinations that affect all of the senses (like seeing moving and creeping things in wallpaper, when it is the only thing you have to look at, maybe?), paranoia, poor impulse control, social withdrawal, outbursts of violence, psychosis, fear of death, self-harm or suicide. Research indicates that both living alone and feelings of loneliness are strongly associated with suicide attempts and suicidal ideation.
Most studies focus on the psychological effects of solitary confinement. However, psychological trauma and loneliness can also lead to physical health problems. Studies indicate that social isolation increases the likelihood of death by 26�32%. According to Dr. Shalev’s book, the recorded physical health effects of solitary confinement include: chronic headaches, eyesight deterioration, digestive problems, dizziness, excessive sweating, fatigue and lethargy, genitourinary problems, heart palpitations, hypersensitivity to light and noise, loss of appetite, muscle and joint pain, sleep problems, trembling hands, weight loss. A lack of physical activity may also make it difficult to manage or prevent certain health conditions, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease.
Not only does the husband subject the woman in the story to restrictions which would harm even a healthy person’s mental health, look at how he treats her mentally and emotionally: Firstly, he speaks to her in a highly patronizing manner - he infantilizes her by speaking to her exactly as if she were a three year old child:
“…when I came back John was awake. “What is it, little girl?� he said. “Don’t go walking about like that � you’ll get cold.� ...and a bit further on: � “Bless her little heart!� said he with a big hug, “she shall be as sick as she pleases! But now let’s improve the shining hours by going to sleep, and talk about it in the morning!� …and further on: � “Really dear you are better!� “Better in body perhaps—� I began, and stopped short, for he sat up straight and looked at me with such a stern, reproachful look that I could not say another word. “My darling,� said he, “I beg of you, for my sake and for our child’s sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?� So of course I said no more on that score, and he went to sleep before long.
Notice also, that the narrator was forcibly placed in a children's nursery with bars on the windows - the husband insisted - just another symbol of how she is forced into a 'child-role'. Not only does John address his wife, the protagonist, with infantilizing epithets, but whenever she tells him anything, he always contradicts it. When she says she is feeling worse, he contradicts with the assurance that she is getting better. When she says she needs company or stimulation, he assures her that it would be bad for her.
Gilman herself said that she wrote The Yellow Wallpaper as an admonishment to the neurologist Dr Silas Weir Mitchell who had recommended the “rest cure� and who had: “…sent me home with solemn advice to “live as domestic a life as far as possible,� to “have but two hours� intellectual life a day,� and “never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again� as long as I lived. This was in 1887. I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months, and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over. Then, using the remnants of intelligence that remained, and helped by a wise friend, I cast the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again � work, the normal life of every human being; work, in which is joy and growth and service, without which one is a pauper and a parasite � ultimately recovering some measure of power. Being naturally moved to rejoicing by this narrow escape, I wrote The Yellow Wall Paper, with its embellishments and additions, to carry out the ideal (I never had hallucinations or objections to my mural decorations) and sent a copy to the physician who so nearly drove me mad…�
Gilman appears to have been very “service�-oriented, and her intention of helping fellow suppressed and repressed women is hinted at in the story in an interesting way: Toward the end of the story, the protagonist starts to have visual hallucinations, and believes that she sees “a woman� trapped behind the bars of the wallpaper’s pattern. It’s not hard to deduce that she is seeing herself there, trapped as she is in a room with barred windows. But then, later on, it really becomes disconcerting, but what excellent metaphor the author employs:
“The front pattern DOES move � and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it! Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern � it strangles so; (the strictures of society) I think that is why it has so many heads. They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white!�
It seems clear to me that at some point an aspect of the wallpaper pattern symbolizes all the restrictions placed upon the woman's freedom and activities. It represents the bars of a metaphorical prison cell, which is of course, why the woman in the story is so keen to pull the wallpaper off. And so Gilman herself pulled and pulled away at those strictures in society to help free the other women also stuck behind the imprisoning pattern of the wallpaper.
After reading up about Charlotte Gilman’s “rest cure� I scrounged around in my old Virginia Woolf notes, and found that “the rest cure� seemed to have become worse by the time poor Virginia was a recipient of it - and lo and behold, Charlotte's doctor is actually mentioned by name. I quote from a biography of Woolf Virginia Woolf by Hermoine Lee:
Woolf’s doctor (appropriately named ‘Savage�, ...more
Another one of the titles on my “most disturbing short story list�
This time the story is from George RR Martin, the guy thatDisturbometer 7 out of 10.
Another one of the titles on my “most disturbing short story list�
This time the story is from George RR Martin, the guy that wrote Game of Thrones. At this point in my list, most of the stories had come from earlier than the 1960’s. (That is, with the exception of the Vonnegut and of the Ligotti. But for me Ligotti’s prose feels stiff and stilted and the Vonnegut story was sort of dramatic surrealism). So when I started reading Martin’s story, I was immediately struck by how modern and natural his prose and his characters felt, and to my surprise, it was actually a relief after the stilted and old-fashioned stuffiness of people who wrote stories long ago. (I’d just finished two volumes of Shirley Jackson stories to boot.)
So even though the story starts off with a fairly mundane scenario, I was kind of enjoying myself. Not for long, though. There was a fly in the “we’ve happily moved to a new apartment� ointment. There was a booger in the nose of the story, that just wouldn’t go away, like one of those zits that just get worse when you try to squish them into extinction. It was The Pear-shaped Man.
He was like the dog-crap that you can’t get off your shoe. He was like the bubble-gum you sat on and can’t get off the seat of your pants. He was like an ear-worm of the crappiest song you’d ever heard. He was the floater in the toilet that refused to go down. He was like the fly on Mike Pence’s head. He was like the mosquito that had crept through the mosquito net. He was like that ex who keeps trying to hook up with you again. He was that ink on your fingers that just won’t wash off. He was the spam that keeps coming even after you’ve blocked both the mail and the domain. He was the smell of the garlic that you’d eaten too much of the night before. He was like loud noises in the plumbing when you’re trying to sleep, or the neighbor playing Heavy Metal on full volume at 4 AM in the morning when you have a presentation to give. He was like rats in the roof, like cockroaches under the sink. He was like tinnitus and like indigestion. He was like ants in your sugar, like sleet in the street. He was the loud static on a phone call. He was like a cheese curl that you find in your clean underpants/panties. He was like the persistent smell of vomit after that drunk friend you were so kind to give a lift to, barffed in your car. He was like a scream in the brakes of your car that progresses to a scream in the back of your head. Have you finally got it, dear readers, what The Pear-shaped Man was like?
Only, that’s not all he was. Nooooooo-no-no-no. He was something far worse. But you’d have to read the story to truly know how The Pear-shaped Man is.
All I’ll say further on the matter, is that I felt ill for a while after finishing the story, and that I will never look at cheese curls the same way again; they will always remind me of The Pear-shaped Man. Also, the story did have a Lovecraftian feel to it at the end, but at least those writers from long ago were subtle�...more
Disturbometer: Hard to say..... it's blurry, I can't read it...
Number 8 in the "most disturbing short story ever written" series.
Well written short stDisturbometer: Hard to say..... it's blurry, I can't read it...
Number 8 in the "most disturbing short story ever written" series.
Well written short story that delivers on the premise suggested in its opening paragraphs: beware the lure of the monkey's paw, unless you have your wishes very, very well formulated!
The story is a variation on the "genie in a bottle who will grant you three wishes" trope, and if the story falls a little short of 4 or 5 stars, it's in the commonness of the basis that the story was built on, which unfortunately makes it slightly predictable. The first iteration of this story that I know of, is not the djinn, but of King Midas who wished for all he touched to turn to gold.
On the other hand, this particular story is well written, well-paced and atmospheric. Not bad at all for the time it was written (1902).
This might be a slight cop-out, but GR friend Cecily basically took the words out of my mouth and added to them, and since I simply cannot improve on what she said, I defer to her excellent review: /review/show...
For some amusing side remarks about stuffed or shriveled animal body-parts, I also refer to my friend Shovelmonkey's review: /review/show......more
Number 7 from my list of "most disturbing (short) stories ever"
Trigger warning to rape survivors aDisturbometer: 10 out of 10
WARNING: light spoilers.
Number 7 from my list of "most disturbing (short) stories ever"
Trigger warning to rape survivors and those who had been victims of psychopaths.
The basic pattern of the events that take place in this story, has happened millions of times before, and probably will happen again, many many times. I know Arnold Friend, I’ve seen him before.
I know there isn’t consensus about exactly what a "psychopath"(/sociopath/malignant narcissist/person with anti-social personality disorder) is, but for purposes of this review, I’m going with James Fallon’s description in his enlightening book The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain, and using the term psychopath since that is the term that most people still know this personality type by.
The problem with this type of manipulative person is that the more intelligent ones almost have a sixth sense of where their potential victim’s frailties lie, and they know exactly how to exploit it. They tend to have a lot of charisma and a superficial charm that often allows them to get under the potential victim's skin, or at least gives them a foot in the door towards gaining the attention of the potential victim.
They will not hesitate, for example, to use a person’s concern for their loved ones against them. They’ll use anything; your sense of shame, your fear of bodily harm, your innate greed, anything that they can spot after prodding and probing in an effort to figure out where your weak spots lie.
And they do, believe me, they do figure it out, and they use this knowledge to devastating effect. The best one can do is to keep a cool head and place as much distance as you still can between yourself and this person. For some, though, it might be too late by the time they realize what they’re dealing with.
Joyce Carol Oates' depiction of the situation and the personalities involved, is so spot-on, that the effect is chillingly realistic. Absolutely frightening in it's psychological accuracy.
(view spoiler)[ When I found out this story was based on the real case of serial killer Charles Schmid, I was even more disturbed. In an essay that Oates wrote about the similarities and differences between her story and a film based upon her story, "Smooth Talking" she very clearly states that the ending of the film (where the girl is only raped, but manages to walk away) differs from the story's ending: the film ends not with death, not with a sleepwalker’s crossing over to her fate; {...}[however]“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?� defines itself as allegorical in its conclusion: Death and Death’s chariot (a funky souped-up convertible) have come for the Maiden.(hide spoiler)]...more
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