Compare And Contrast The Yellow Wallpaper And Crime And Punishment

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Recommended: Poverty as a reason for crime

In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and the novel Crime and Punishment, wallpaper is a heavily used symbol representing many different ideas like poverty, mental degradation and depression, and the Devil. By using wallpaper to symbolize these philosophies and ideas, both authors create an atmosphere of darkness and despair for their characters to survive in. Poverty is a big idea symbolized by wallpaper in both stories. In Crime and Punishment, wallpaper is used in the description of Raskolnikov’s room to portray to the reader the depth of Raskolnikov’s financial situation: It was a tiny cupboard of a room about six paces in length. It had a poverty-stricken appearance with its dusty yellow paper peeling off the walls, and it was so low-pitched that a man of more than average height was ill at ease in it and felt every moment that he would knock his head against the ceiling. (Dostoevsky 24) The use of wallpaper in this passage paints a picture of a room that is very dirty and unkempt. The fact that the paper is peeling off the walls is a sign of long put-off maintenance. Not only is the paper in tatters, the furniture inside the room is also in shambles: “A big clumsy sofa occupied almost the whole of one wall …show more content…

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the woman slowly dives into a pool of insanity caused by the hypnotic pattern of the yellow wallpaper: “There is one marked peculiarity about this paper, a thing nobody seems to notice but myself, and that is that it changes as the light changes”(Perkins 8). This can be compared to Raskolnikov’s overactive thoughts and strive for loneliness: “He had got completely away from everyone, like a tortoise in its shell, and even the sight of a servant girl…[made] him writhe with nervous irritation”(Dostoevsky 25). For Raskolnikov, being in the presence of the nasty wallpaper also drives him

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