Comparison of A Rose for Emily and The Yellow Wallpaper

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William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” are two short stories which incorporate many similarities, both stories are about the emotional and psychological experiences of two women living in a reclusive environment. The women presented in both of the stories experience moments of insanity, loneliness, feelings of being controlled by others, and of loss of psychological self-control. In both of the stories, each of the women experience similar situations, in a complete different environment, and while one is practically force to refrain for outside stimulation, the other voluntarily avoids them. In A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner tells the story as if a narrator who appears to be a citizen of the town with plenty of knowledge of the situation. The town is described as a once wealthy area inhabited by people that held proper disciplined principles and maintained good values in the community, but as every other town, it aged over time, and lost its values. The main character of the story is Mrs. Emily Grierson. Emily has secluded herself from others in town, and it wasn't until Emily’s passing that everyone knew the reality that existed in her life. Emily was once the beautiful daughter of a respectable family. However, Emily's father is extremely overprotective and unable to consider any man good enough to marry his daughter. Because of her father’s overwhelming insecurity Emily was never able to socialize with others in town, and prevented her from finding true love, marrying or having a chance of living a normal and productive life. After her father's death, Emily, now an older woman living with nothing but the family home and the families name, struggles to accept the realit... ... middle of paper ... ...e woman which she perceived to be trapped and struggling from inside the pattern. When John manages to break into the room and sees the horror of the situation, he faints in the doorway. The similarities of both stories can be read as we go along each sentence, except, for the particular that each of the authors depict in each of their stories. Both women seem to be around the same age. They both suffer from a mental illness, and as we can read in both stories, no one seems to be concern with the well-being of either woman. The other characters in the stories tend to ignore the symptoms that each of the woman are showing. Another similarity is that both woman are driven to their psychological state by someone that they look up to. In ‘A Rose for Emily”, it is her father who keeps her isolated from the world, as for in “The Yellow Wallpaper” it is the husband.

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