The past couple of weeks have tested my ability to manage my course load, writing, working (or trying to), my contributions to The Resistance, my commitment to overdressing, cultivating community/a social life, and, most importantly, being a mom. There’s obviously the challenge of being present in Harper and Truman’s lives when I live six hours away from them (tomorrow, I’m driving to Shreveport for the second time in two weeks), but then there’s also co-parenting. On top of everything else, I had to coordinate engaging a new attorney last week (my original one was wonderful, but she decided to leave private practice for the time being). Thankfully, it’s going well for the most part: the kids are great, school is good overall (a certain lab midterm was, in a word, tragic, but I’ll figure it out), I have some work in the short term, New Orleans is the ideal place to thrift weirdly formal men’s clothing, and cool people abound here.

However, to paraphrase Bridget Jones, the pressure of unperformed tasks may cause me to explode into bats. Am I bad anti-fascist if I admit I’m sort of looking forward to the National Strike on Feb. 28 because I don’t have to work, go to school, run errands, etc.? I plan to take this thing all the way, y’all. My calendar for that day reads,

DO NOTHING.
BUY NOTHING.
LIE IN BED.
THINK THOUGHTS.

Heavenly. Also, hopefully, effective.

If you’re tempted to think I’m self-indulgent or the strike is an excuse for liberals to be lazy, then I ask you to consider Tricia Hersey‘s idea that Rest is Resistance.

She says:

My rest as a Black woman in America suffering from generational exhaustion and racial trauma always was a political refusal and social justice uprising within my body. I took to rest and naps and slowing down as a way to save my life, resist the systems telling me to do more and most importantly as a remembrance to my Ancestors who had their DreamSpace stolen from them. This is about more than naps. It is not about fluffy pillows, expensive sheets, silk sleep masks or any other external, frivolous, consumerist gimmick. It is about a deep unraveling from white supremacy and capitalism. These two systems are violent and evil. History tells us this and our present living shows this. Rest pushes back and disrupts a system that views human bodies as a tool for production and labor.

So get your bonnet, your sleep mask, your mouth tape, and your CPAP machine, and go the fuck to sleep.

In the meantime, read my thoughts about Frankenstein and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” And be very, very grateful I don’t have the ability to shoot lightning bolts from my fingertips.

Yet.

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Kelly Phelan
Frankenstein Chapters 21 – 24
2-8-25

Chapter 24: Victor and the Sailors
First, why do the sailors very nearly mutiny? Are their demands reasonable?
And why does Victor admonish them? Is he being hypocritical? What about his warnings to Walton at the beginning of the novel?

The sailors nearly mutiny in Chapter 24 of Frankenstein because they are, at this point in the novel, apparently the only people left alive in Victor’s universe still exercising logic and rational thinking. Their concerns and singular demand could not be more reasonable: They “were immured in ice…[and] they feared that if…the ice should dissipate and a free passage be opened, [Walton] should be rash enough to continue [his] voyage and lead them into fresh dangers…They insisted, therefore, that [he] should engage with a solemn promise that if the vessel should be freed [he] would instantly direct [his] course southwards.” Imagine having to threaten to riot in order to (hopefully) persuade your boss not to sail you from abject peril all the way to certain death. As the kids would say, it’s giving Trump Administration. 

It turns out the sailors’ concerns were 100 percent founded because, incredibly, Walton hesitates to agree to their terms and Victor launches into what is probably the most hypocritical hype-up in the history of literature. He practically comes back to life just to scold the sailors for 1) making unreasonable demands (?!) of a ships’ captain; 2) realizing they’re on a fool’s errand (an errand they wouldn’t be on were it not for Victor, ahem,taking unreasonable demands of the ship’s captain) and, rather than continuing to rush headlong toward A MONSTER, desiring to change course; and 3) much unlike Victor, recognizing before their ruin that glory isn’t everything. Victor is laughably guilty of everything of which he accuses the sailors; furthermore, unlike them, it apparently never occurs to Victor to reconsider his actions, and, even on his deathbed, he has absolutely no insight into his myriad mistakes. Does he really not hear it when he says it out loud? 

Victor’s hypocrisy literally knows no bounds. In the beginning of the novel, he attempts, as soon as possible, to intrigue Walton about the circumstances that led to him becoming stranded on an ice floe. “I have, doubtless, excited your curiosity,” he teases, “but you are too considerate to make inquiries.” If that’s not an invitation, then I’ve never heard one. When Walton begins relaying the details of his “enterprise” to him, Victor launches into a Shakesperean soliloquy: “Unhappy man!” he weeps melodramatically, though Walton is nothing of the sort (he’s foolish, but he’s happy enough). “Do you share my madness? Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught?” 

Blame it on the “intoxicating draught” or Victor’s hubris, but, either way, his desire to “dash the cup from [Walton’s] lips” goes right out the window when he begs Walton to, rather than honor his commitment to the sailors, continue pursuing and kill his Creation/the consequences of his actions. “When actuated by selfish and vicious motives, I asked you to undertake my unfinished work, and I renew this request now, when I am only induced by reason and virtue.” Aside from the fact that one’s deathbed is typically not where one does one’s most “reasoned” thinking, Victor is never once motivated by anything but “selfish and vicious motives”! Truly, this man wouldn’t know “reason and virtue” if they slapped him in the face. 

As toxic bromances go, Victor and Walton are one for the ages. 

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Kelly Phelan
“The Yellow Wallpaper”
2-15-25

The Husband
What do we know about the protagonist’s husband? How has he been characterized?
Also, how does he treat his wife? What is his role in her illness?
Is he the/an antagonist in the story? Why or why not? Can his actions be defended?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is my all-time favorite short story, beating even those written by Truman Capote, for whom I named my son. As a writer myself, there’s a special horror in the idea of being forbidden to write and having to do so in secret. Years ago, I wrote a research paper about “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and, when the instructor returned it, she had written at the top, “A+!” 

Then, below that: “You are very angry.” 

It was and shall forever remain one of the proudest moments of my academic career.

I’m sure it will come as no surprise, then, that John, as the antagonist, was the object of my withering contempt for his indefensible behavior as a husband and judgement as a physician. The narrator, the protagonist, struggles mightily against him and is, to some degree successful – she does, after all, manage to document her experiences in a journal of sorts. She begs him, then she tries to reason with him, then she begs him again, and then she finally thwarts him once and for all by becoming the creeping woman in the wallpaper. 

Some say John treats the narrator as a child – and there is a most compelling argument for that – but I think it’s actually worse: In my opinion, he treats her less like a daughter than a doll. He never even calls her by her name! In one infuriating scene, he seemingly agrees to re-paper the well-worn nursery (where the dolls live) that functions as the narrator’s bedroom, then, when he doesn’t, couches his disinterest and lack of funds as not “[giving] way to…fancies.” “Then,” she says, “he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down cellar, if I wished, and have it white-washed in the bargain.” As if! One suspects the decaying condition of the “ancestral hall” (read: long-neglected family home) and Jennie, John’s sister’s, occupation as the narrator’s nurse indicate this physician’s “high standing” may be illusory.

This physician won’t even allow his “patient” (there’s an entire thesis waiting to be written about the impropriety of John treating his own wife) suffering from “nervous depression” to sleep in her preferred room. “He said there was only one window and not room for two beds, and no near room for him if he took another.” The greatest irony is, of course, that his “treatment” is, at very least, exacerbating the narrator’s psychological condition; at worst, he’s causing it. Do no harm, indeed.