yellow motif within crime and punishment

[kellyp89]

heyy guys!

does anyone have an opinion as to dostoyevsky's placement of yellow within crime and punishment??

thanks,

kelly

[bazarov]

Hello! I'm not sure what do you mean? Can you be more specific?

[seasong]

I remember the emphasis. Wasn't it that anything yellow was associated with sickness and disease? Like the cities water. Yellow appears whenever Raskolnikov allows himself to not care about other people. There's that passage in the ending with the plague that infects people making them not care about each other. That's the point.

[kellyp89]

im just trying to understand more about why dostoyevsky uses the color/motif yellow to describe raskolnikov's apartment as "the small room into which the young man stepped...[filled with] yellow wallpaper, windowsill geraniums, chintz curtains...illuminated by the setting sun" and sonya's passport as she "lives by the yellow ticket"
i mean, it just seems ironic how he describe these ppl/places with disgust and yet yellow when thinking of the color seems to connotate cheerfulness.

[kellyp89]

thanks seasong

[Yelena]

i think yellow as a color is highly symbolic. i also read somewhere that most of the maniacs, or, lets say, mentally challeged people like either purple color or yellow color. ofcoarse dostoevsky coudln't have been familiar with that statistics, but i'm sure that maybe "subconciously" he was aware of it.

[bazarov]

Yes.. Near the end of the 19th century, the yellow color was often associated with mental illness, specifically including insanity, and with other sorts of mental problems. It's obvious for Raskolnikov situation, but Sonya wasn't crazy.Under the Russian 19th century law, as a prostitute, Sonya nedded to carry a yellow card with her and leave her home.

[elizabethross67]

The Russian word "zholtyy dom" is a lunatic asylum. A "zholtyy dom" is literally a "yellow house"

[socceree02]

Yellow is NOT to be taken as a symbol of cheeriness.
Within the universal color symbols, yellow stands for impurity and specifically to C&P it stands for impurity and decay.
They way Dostoevsky uses the color allows for it to not be taken as cheeriness, which it CAN mean but it is made clear when it means such.
They way he describes the yellow objects or people as musty and old gives the sense of a deep "pus-like" yellow giving the color of rotting and decay.

The novel's yellow references ought be read that way. I think with that in mind while you read, it will be much more helpful to understanding the symbol of yellow.

[One Gallant]

I always thought it was symbolic of jaundice. Which is caused by the liver not working correctly. Also "Jaundiced eye" is an idiom meaning prejudiced view (coming from it was thought people with jaundice saw everything in yellow). I don't know if it's an idiom in the Russian language but Alexander Pope used the term in the early seventeen hundreds so it might have been something Dostoyevsky would have known.

That might be completely wrong but that's what I thought it meant.

I like the "zholtyy dom" reply. Do you know why it's called that?

[janesmith]

Yellow has long been associated with madness. For example, "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.