Essay On Mental Illness In A Rose For Emily And The Yellow Wallpaper

Untreated

For ages mental illness has been a problem across the world. It plagues everyone from kids to adults, poor to rich, and weak to strong. For many it is an unimaginable burden to carry, but for others they find light in being able to perceive illness through their writings. That’s what can be said about Nobel Peace Prize winner William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” and feminist Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Both were early 20th century writers. While both may be comparable based on their dark roots and bouts with mental illness, both can be contrasted just as easily based on their storytelling, writing styles, and character personalities.

Both stories seem to indulge in darkness. Keeping you on edge and forcing you to question what is going on, the two almost follow a pattern. For starters, the main characters in each story are struggling with mental illness in their own way. Emily, the main character in A Rose for Emily, appears to be distraught over the death of her father and the leaving of her once thought love. The events cause her to cut herself off from the average person where she lives and conform to a life unaccompanied by anyone but her servant. The unnamed narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is diagnosed by

her husband as having temporary nervous depression and slight hysterical disorder. Which could have easily been a misdiagnosis based on the time period the story was held in and the knowledge her husband had about mental illness. The narrator quickly becomes sheltered by her overprotective husband which causes her to be put into solitary conditions against her will. The two characters quickly find that their worlds change when they continue to live under the conditions. Conditions like self loathing which causes one character to push away any help that the people of her community tries to give her, and conditions that causes the other to not be able to sleep at night. Conditions that will not help their mental health without seeking professional guidance Emily soon plots to kill her new found companion, Homer Barron, while the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper obsesses over someone that she believes is trapped within her room’s wallpaper. Ultimately the two both go insane giving their circumstances.

While these two may share multiple qualities they differ just as much, A Rose for Emily starts off rather depressing. Addressing the death of Emily in the beginning only to continue to build onto the mood from that point on. On top of that the story is told by someone in the town. She refer to herself and the people at we and judges Emily Grierson throughout the entire story. The narrator feels as though Emily sees herself above the working class and thinks she should go through the things she does. She believes it would bring her off of her high horse and down to earth with everyone else. In The Yellow Wallpaper they break into the stories by helping paint a peaceful picture. A working class family with a newborn moving into a beautiful house. It then moves forward by pressing an unsurety on the reader. The narrator reveals she is ill, but soon after follows up with erratic behavior pertaining to her wallpaper. Since the narrator does not know the extent of her illness she goes throught the story believing that the wall is in fact holding someone prisoner. Few other things could be accounted for, Like how in the first story the house is old and not aesthetically pleasing while the home in the latter is portrayed as nice and beautiful, though having terrible wallpaper in that one room.
As you can see from the text above both stories are highly comparative and give good reasons to pick apart the differences between the two.

Showing the pros and cons between the reads is important to help understand what the author is trying is trying to get across. Having a deeper understand of things you read will always be important. Although a tale of a woman gone mad over a wallpaper may appear to be as is, there could always be more to it. Just because a story of woman turned psycho killer may seem exactly as that I’d have to say there was more. The message I grasped from the two after breaking them down is that mental illness gone untreated can be detrimental to the positive progress of yourself and your

life.