House of Spirits Ideology

The ideological concept I can relate to in the book is when Senator Trueba is warning of the potential Socialist overthrow of the government. Being a history major I've read how the rise of Marxism was such a scare at the time. There had been investigations of countless numbers of people here in America alone. The threat of Marxism is still aparent today, but we do not consider it as much of a threat to our democratic way of life.

The Awakening

The beginning of the story the character 'Edna' seemed to be uneasy about life in general and her marriage, as if she was not happy. She was married and had children, although she loved them dearly, seemingly only had them because it was expected for the wife to have kids. In the book she learns how to swim and makes many references to the sea, I took this as her way of saying that she much like the sea is always changing and she will be changing a lot. She eventually breaks her routine, which is odd given the time period. Most people had a set routine and stuck to it.
Throughout the book it seemed as if she did not fit in with society. She started to paint, would go out and listen to music and began to cheat on her husband. She eventually commits suicide in the sea because it was like she felt so far away from common society.

Yellow Wallpaper

The story is set about a woman basically held captive in her own home by her husband. She could do nothing as her husband had thought she was becoming insane. He kept her locked in a room by her self for most of the time she was a 'captive'. She had nearly no contact with the outside world because her husband thought it was contributing to her dementia. The room that she had been confined to had yellow wallpaper, she compares the paper to the bars of a prision cell, keeping her from the outside world. In the paper she saw a woman that like her self seemed to be imprisoned and confined from the outside world. Although this is a work of fiction, it seems that it could have been something that would actually happen given the time period that was implied.

Douglas

What I liked most about the narrative was that it was a first hand account of how slaves were treated at the time. Douglas goes in great detail in the story about the beatings he sustained. Also how people would change quickly when they had a slave, like showing some type of dominance over their slave(s).

At the time, of Douglas' publication, people would not have thought much of his accounts because it was something that was common in society. The fact that he had been educated, wrote this himself and had it published would be shocking to American society of the time. Today Douglas' accounts seem and are shocking, to how a society can let this go on without anyone trying to stop it.

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