Isolation's Delusions in Winter Dreams & A Wagner Matinee

The Delusions of Isolation

This was...the place he had passed so many times, the destination he had longed for with such happiness. But now that he had found it, now that he was here, why... had the town, the road, the earth, the very entrance to this place he loved turned unfamiliar as the landscape of some ugly dream? — The Far and the Near, by Thomas Wolfe It is important for everyone to frequently interact with many different people; otherwise a person will be unable to accept that the ideal world they envision is not reality.

By alienating himself from other people, he will create imaginary scenarios that he will begin to believe are real. Each of these three stories each illustrate this theme differently. In Winter Dreams, a young man begins to idolize a beautiful girl; after being separated for some time, he is shocked to discover that she is not actually the exciting and perfect future wife he had convinced himself she was.

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The woman in A Wagner Matinee experiences a similar shock after many decades of suppressed emotions become apparent after she finally revisits the city of her youth. In contrast, however, the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper goes into a state of postpartum psychosis and gradually sinks further into her delusions and eventually goes entirely insane after she is forced into isolation by her husband. The main character in Winter Dreams, A Wagner Matinee, and The Yellow Wallpaper each deceive themselves of different things, though all of these deceptions stem from their isolation.

In Winter Dreams, a teenaged golf caddy named Dexter meets an eleven-year-old girl named Judy Jones; he quits his well-paying job at the golf course after deciding that he would rather be unemployed than caddy for Judy. Later in life, a now-rich Dexter reencounters Judy Jones, who is now not only “arrestingly beautiful,” but also a huge flirt (Fitzgerald). After having dinner together, Dexter "decide[s] that he had wanted Judy Jones ever since he was a proud, desirous little boy" (ibid). He begins to fall in love with Judy and chooses to ignore the fact that he is only “one of a varying dozen [men] who circulated about [Judy];" he even “wanted to take Judy Jones with him [to move to New York),” presumably as his wife (ibid). Shortly after getting engaged to a woman named Irene while Judy is away, Judy convinces Dexter that she would marry him if he broke off his engagement to Irene. He does so, unaware that “Judy's flare for [Dexter] [would endure) just one month” (ibid). Dexter leaves town, and many years later, he learns that Judy Jones has lost all her beauty and is now just a housewife with an alcoholic husband who "treats [Judy, like the devil” (ibid). Dexter is outraged at this, as this is the kind of boring life he had not imagined for a woman whose “deficiencies were knit up with a passionate energy that transcended and justified them” (ibid). He then realizes that his idea of Judy was nothing more than a dream, and now he felt as if "[something had been taken from him” (ibid).

Dexter's journey demonstrates that, even if a person is a fully participating member of society, he can still generate delusions about another person if they are separated from them for long enough. It is then a painful, but liberating experience when the person who was previously isolated is forced to face the fact that their delusions are different than reality.

A similar situation occurs in A Wagner Matinee, when a woman named Georgiana visits her nephew to settle an estate in Boston, the town where she had spend her youth and fostered a love of music as “a music-teacher at the Boston Conservatory” (Cather). She now lives in Nebraska, having moved there thirty years ago after eloping with her current husband. Since then, she has lived a quiet life in "a dugout in the red hillside" and has not been more than fifty miles away from it in the decades she has lived there (ibid). Her nephew, Clark, takes her to see a symphony concert of music written by Wagner, even though she seems disinterested and "altogether too timid" at first (ibid). As soon as they enter the concert hall, Georgiana "was a trifle less passive and inert, and seemed to begin to perceive her surroundings" (ibid). Just before the concert begins, she gives “a little stir of anticipation,” and she spends the entirety of the first piece “clutch[ing Clark’s] coat-sleeve” (ibid). For the duration of the next piece, Georgiana sits completely still, “though her fingers worked mechanically upon her black dress, as though of themselves they were recalling the piano score they had once played” (ibid). At the beginning of the following song, however, “[Georgiana's] eyes were closed, but the tears were glistening on her cheeks” (ibid). She spends some of the intermission, as well as the rest of the pieces, silently crying to the sound of the music. Once the concert concludes, Georgiana "burst[s] into tears and sob[s] pleadingly, 'I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!”” (ibid). Both Clark and Georgiana realize that Georgiana is, in fact, miserable on the small farm in Nebraska, but has deluded herself into thinking that she was content. She is incredibly unhappy to return to her mundane life, though she knows that she must. After alienating herself from the music in Boston, she pushes herself further into her isolation by making herself believe that she is happy in the countryside.

Unlike Georgiana, the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper actually wants to continue living in her delusions after being isolated. After giving birth, she is brought to the doctor by her husband and told by the doctor to essentially stay bedridden for the entire summer. The woman is put into the attic by her husband and is rarely allowed to come out until her husband says that she is well again. Though she soon comes to accept her almost prisoner-like situation and enjoys the view from windows as well as the relatively spacious size of the room, she frequently complains about the ugly yellow wallpaper, which is “repellent, almost revolting” in color (Gilman). As the days go by in the room, however, she begins to see shapes in the lines of the cracked wallpaper, even though they are obviously nonexistent. The first conclusive image she sees is that of a woman, who she gradually grows more fond of as time passes. One day she finds her sister-in law touching the wallpaper where she believes the shape of the woman is, and grows very defensive of it. That night, she begins to see the wallpaper pattern begin to move, and thinks that the "woman behind [the wallpaper] shakes it" (ibid). Her imaginary woman becomes more and more active, and eventually the narrator thinks she can see the woman behind the wallpaper “creeping” along the walls. She finds her sister-in-law examining the wallpaper again and becomes outraged, even saying that "no person touches this paper but menot ALIVE!” (ibid).

The narrator sees more and more women behind the wallpaper, all “creeping" behind the wallpaper. She begins to believe that she, too, is one of the women behind the wallpaper, and wonders if "all [the women) come out of that wall-paper as I [the narrator] did” (ibid).

Eventually the narrator becomes so obsessed with the women behind the wallpaper that she begins to try to free them by ripping the wallpaper off the wall. Though she had once enjoyed visiting the garden when she could, she no longer “like[s] to LOOK out of the windows even” because she thinks that, as one of the women in the wallpaper, she belongs in the room (ibid). At the end of the summer, when it is finally time to leave the house, she refuses to open the door for her husband. Once he finally enters the room, she tells him that she has escaped the wallpaper and that she has “pulled off most of the paper, so you [her husband and his sister] can't put me back!” (ibid). At this point, that her husband is so bewildered by just how insane she has become due to her isolation that he faints. Though the narrator's delusions seemed like a reality to her, they were actually absurd to everyone else; however, she has become too isolated to realize this.

In both Winter Dreams and A Wagner Matinee, the characters that experience the isolation become aware of their delusions because they are put into a situation in which they need to come to terms with their delusions, but the main character in The Yellow Wallpaper is forced to remain alienated from other people until it is too late and she had become obsessed with what she thinks is real. Though the scenario presented in The Yellow Wallpaper is perhaps a little more extreme than those in Winter Dreams and A Wagner Matinee, it illustrates the fact that, had Dexter and Georgiana not been able to face their own delusions, they would have slowly sunk further into what they had led themselves to believe. This can also be seen in Thomas Wolfe's The Far and the Near, in which a recently retired train conductor goes to search for a woman and her elderly mother, both of whom he had waved to from his train every day for many years. During that time, from his isolated conductor's room in the train, he had developed for them “such tenderness as a man might feel for his own children.” However, it becomes apparent that the two women do not feel the same amount of affection for him when he shows up at their house. He had led himself to believe that the two of them were “beautiful and enduring[,] beyond all change and ruin," but after an awkward confrontation with a woman whose "face was harsh and pinched and meager,” he realizes that the women did not have the kind of life he had imagined they had. Instead of greeting him like an old friend, they regarded him with "timid suspicion and uneasy doubt," even after he told them who he was (ibid). The conductor's delusion was destroyed once he stopped being isolated from the two women. This closely resembles the reaction that Dexter in Winter Dreams and Georgiana in A Wagner Matinee had when they, too, came to realize that their delusions differed from reality, as well as the woman from The Yellow Wallpaper presumably would have had if she had been able to leave the isolated room. All of these stories are a relatively accurate representation of what people in real life will likely experience when they are placed in similar situations; becoming isolated from any major part of one's life will lead them to fantasize and create delusions about it, and if they continue to remain in isolation, those fantasies will ultimately control them.