ThroughoutAs I Lay Dying, Dewey Dell confronts an unwanted pregnancy and struggles with barriers to medical treatment. Reproductive and bodily autonomy are common themes in the American literary canon. This learning module compares Dewey Dell’s journey to a similar fight for bodily and reproductive autonomy in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper”.
Using the Digital Yoknapatawpha Event Search tool, students will analyze how gender and class form barriers to women’s bodily and reproductive autonomy.
This learning module has also been tailored for pairings with similar journeys in other classic texts, including:
The event search function allows users to search for events based on very specific conditions. In this instance, the search is utilized to find events where a specific character, Dewey Dell, is present and which also include keywords related to Health and Illness > Abortion.
The Digital Yoknapatawpha editors manually entered these keywords were for each event. They are fundamentally interpretive.
Now that you have surveyed the notable events and places that make up Dewey Dell’s struggle for bodily and reproductive autonomy, examine the barriers she faced.
Write a short response to the following interrelated questions:
In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charlotte Perkins Gilman chronicles the deteriorating mental health of a woman experiencing what we would today diagnose as postpartum depression. She is confined to her bed by the orders of her doctor, and her husband removes any kind of mental stimulus to avoid triggering her hysteria, a now debunked medical diagnosis.
The protagonist struggles to be heard in her pleas for social and intellectual stimulation, but her infantilization by her husband causes her mental health to further decline.
