In The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility from 1857, "Pride" is listed as one of the most hateful dispositions and the reserve that Eleanor and Henry Tilney display in the company of their father is explained by the Guide's author as the means to many a misunderstanding and accidental affronts. (Thornwell, Emily. The Lady's Guide to Perfect Gentility, 1957.)

The Gothic novels that Isabella and Catherine were reading at this time would have used depicted the setting and architecture of the Abbey to reflect and enhance the dark and austere trend of the novels. (Lake, Crystal B. "Studies in English (The Rise of Gothic Literature)."

Inconstancy, changeableness.

"The duties of house." As the only female family in residence at Northanger Abbey, Miss Tilney would be expected to act as the hostess.

This duty would normally be performed by the wife of the household, and in her absence, the eldest daughter or at times, the sister of the host.

The quality or character of being supercilious; haughty, proud, arrogant or contemptuousness.

Details.

Lack of/ absence of.

Enthusiasm/enjoyment.

Could not be doubted.

Comfort.

To see someone "to greater advantage" would be to see them in a more positive way.

Bridge: connecting imagery does not connect, bridge function undermined

Ashcan rantings: same hopelessness/ pointlessness of the small town poet who did nothing. Wasted words/ wasted life/ wasted rant/ unheard. Ashcan rantings: same hopelessness/ pointlessness of the small town poet who did nothing. Wasted words/ wasted life/ wasted rant/ unheard.

Religious imagery, purgatoried their torsos night after night, both endless imagery: “the wheel” motif of the wasteland. While the madness in the first stanza seems imposed, here the purgatory is choice.

The Wasteland: Fallen cities, Germany after WWII?

More unexpected imagery: heaven comes to earth, divine found in poverty. Interesting to think in contrast to Frost’s stopping by the woods on a snowy evening. Divine moment found in the city rather than the trees.

Machinery of night: surprising imagery, night usually as an escape from daily grind, hidden in the night, freedom of the night, starry images usually undermines experience of man, makes feel infinitesimal and therefor life as random. Instead used to elevate experience, desire to connect, desire to be significant.

Quicksand: racial geography, racially defined city space

Wasteland: chaos, destroyed by madness, madness does not seem like it is coming from within, madness imposed on his generation

madness (imposed madness) - yellow wallpaper (madness and anger, few lines down, an angry fix)

Throughout the poem Eliot revisits the imagery of towers. Towers are understood as signs of progress, of civic pride, of civic authority. Towers take on this authority.

In these lines, Eliot literally flips the tower function on its head. The tower that is used to establish a sense of time, Eliot uses to dissociate time. At first it seems that time in the present has ceased to function and all that is left is the ghost of that time. However, Eliot seems more interested in the cyclical nature of time given that the poem opens with a discussion of the inevitability of spring. Because of the cyclical nature of time, the tolling bell seems to be both echoes of past chimes and chimes in the present. The present has now lost its significance and each moment has now lost its sense of originality. Eliot has disoriented time and in doing so, he has undermined one of the most important ordering tools in society. The idea of “now” becomes unreal. The significance of time as a tool is echoed in the architecture of the towers. Clocks are positioned on these towers, these pillars of society.

The tower itself is undermined. Earlier, Eliot references falling towers: Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and London, which were epic civilizations “in their time.” The reference to falling towers immediately connotes biblical reference to the towers of Babel, which fell when God decided that humans had made too much progress and had become arrogant. All that was left was chaos. Eliot uses towers to undermine the arrogance of the concept of progress and disorients the conception of linear time.

unreal city

These two words provide great imagery. Also furry to furious.

The whole poem seems like a brainstorm for the next poem. (Subjects/ lines that could be included.)

Can read "but flutter and flaunt sheer rags, succumbing without emotion" but the lines are broken up so that the women are as sheer rags.

"An agent" but not an agent of change, ironic use of agency as they do not adjust. Lot's of irony here. The woman is without any agency so she is assigned an agent who does nothing.

The narrator is the witness. The reader is now a witness. The reader takes on a certain amount of responsibility now to try to make some adjustment.

Is this Frost anticipating himself as an older and unreliable narrator? (As a youth when he looks down the roads he sees that they are pretty much the same but when in his old age he will say that the road made all the difference.)

Is he in darkness because he is beliefs are so rooted in the New England traditions or because he repeats the traditions without thinking about why he does?

Is Frost also the "something" and does not love a wall?

To be more human, to be more than human as a king or feel more than the presentation of these humans as a poet who feels is equally futile.

i.e. inhuman as they ever were? Lifeless ancient statues just as much as ever?

There is something cyclical and mundane about this dream imagery. Their dreams seem only to be of being young clerks, as if they look back wistfully on images of their former selves serving as clerks.

The wall paper and writing paper hold her secrets.

Somehow this phrase seems to highlight the idea that a "scientific" approach to studying the mind is ridiculous given that the mind is not designed/ arranged on these laws?

The wallpaper becomes more and more personified as she goes on.

Weakness again.

Her mental illness is treated as a weakness to be overcome through willpower.

Possibly reason here has a double meaning, there is no reason for her to suffer, she suffers because she is without reason, i.e. insane.

Mentally ill treated as a little child.

We see the hypocrisy of a prescribed cure that is not conclusive although it is scientific.

The reader can understand mental illness as something that is neither to be felt or seen.