Personal Identity In The Yellow Wallpaper

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Don Robertson and Charlotte Perkins Gilman explore the theme of personal identity throughout their works, from Robertson’s The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, to Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Though both Don Robertson and Charlotte Perkins Gilman both illustrate and explore the theme of personal identity in very different ways, there are also many similar ways it is illustrated and explored by both authors as well. Don Robertson shows this theme of personal identity through Morris Bird’s cautious sense of right and wrong and how he tries to atone for his mistakes throughout the book and wanting to earn self-respect for himself as well as through his journey to see his best friend, Stanley Chaloupka while Gilman shows this through the narrators fight for sanity, illustrating the fight for selfhood by a women in not only an oppressed environment but in an oppressive environment as well.
The theme of personal identity is prevalent in almost every part of Robertson’s, The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread. Whether it is from Morris Birds little stories and sense of right and wrong throughout the book or how he tries to atone for his mistakes in order to earn self-respect for himself or through the journey he makes to see his dearest friend, Stanley. For example, when Morris Bird starts talking about the salami sandwich incident with Logan McMurray when Morris tried to give his sandwich to another kid named Alex Coffee but when Coffee does not want the sandwich, Morris Bird decides to throw the salami sandwich. When the sandwich was found it had landed against the side of Mrs. Ochs’ car “smearing it with mayonnaise and making it absolutely reek of salami…” (Robertson, 14). This shows the theme of personal identity because of the f...

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... seemingly trapped inside the yellow wallpaper, when she sees that constant face of the woman trapped inside, again she sees or is just seeing herself because her, herself is trapped and falling into insanity.
In conclusion, both Don Robertson and Charlotte Perkins Gilman illustrate and explore the theme of personal identity in very different ways throughout both of their works of literature. Don Robertson showed it through his protagonist, Morris Bird and through his yearning for finding self-respect, through his journey to see his best friend Stanley Chaloupka, and through his immense bravery during the explosion while Charlotte Perkins Gilman showed it through the constant face of the woman seemingly trapped inside the ugly yellow wallpaper who was seen by the narrator in the story seeing her own personal identity being shown through the woman in the wallpaper.

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