There are two stories this semester that have been particularly interesting so far. ‘Paul’s Case’ by Willa Cather is a turbulent story about a young man named Paul’s downward spiral into eventual suicide and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a story about a woman forced into the resting cure by means of her husband until being alone with her thoughts drives her to insanity. At face value, these stories have vastly different plots and outcomes. How are you able to compare stories with different plots? In the occasion of the ideas behind the stories being similar, it becomes possible. These two stories have many parallels which will be discussed in detail throughout this essay. Both ‘Paul’s Case’ and The ‘Yellow Wallpaper’ …show more content…
are works of psychological realism. While realism itself is an account or an objective view of the human experience, psychological realism is a subset of realism that focuses heavily on the state of mind of the main character. In ‘Paul’s Case’ Paul is described as a misfit not fitting in with his school, home life, and what society expects of him. The only escape from the misery he feels in regards to his life is theatre and the arts. The escape becomes an obsession and he loses himself in his own imagined fantasy of how life, in particular, his life should be. His fantasy life constructed through fanciful thinking and lies is picked apart multiple times in the story and eventually the conflict between reality and fantasy comes to a head when his father withdrawals him from school and gets him a job as a cash boy. Paul’s life at this point has become so intolerable to him that he steals money from his employers and has an eight day trip to New York. During his fantasy vacation, he loses himself in the pleasures of the higher class. After the eight days when he has exhausted most of the money and realized his father has come to look for him, he realizes that there is no further escape from the reality of his middle class life and commits suicide. In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, the narrator of the story is a woman who after having her first child has become depressed and her husband thinks it is best for her to have the resting cure. While this seems like a good idea for the time period, leaving someone who is depressed or anxious alone with their thoughts and no stimulation is not a sound treatment. As the narrator writes in her diary it is easy to see that she becomes more and more distraught the longer the resting cure is being implemented. She also becomes more fixated on the ugly yellow wallpaper in the room and uncovering its secrets is the only way other than writing that she has the ability to find some sort of outlet for her creative mind. At the climax and end of the story, she has a breakdown and her husband finds her crawling around the wall in the room. He faints and she crawls over him and away to her freedom. Both ‘Paul’s Case’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ offer a look into the main characters’ mind and their subsequent mental decay at the hardships they face. This also leads into another parallel between the stories in that both the main characters are in some ways mad or insane.
In ‘Paul’s Case’ Paul has this fantasy of the world and how wonderful it must be to live in the upper class of society. The fantasy overtakes his life to such a drastic point that his father is finally forced to try and intervene by means of taking him out of school and his job as an user to a normal job as a cash boy for a business office. Faced with the reality of his social situation he steals money from his job and flees to the Waldorf hotel to live the life of luxury that he believes he should be living. Once again reality comes crashing down on his fantasy once he is nearly out of money and his father is coming to look for him. Not being able to live in the reality of his middle class life he commits suicide to escape it. In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ she becomes fixated on the Yellow Wallpaper in her room as an outlet for her creative mind. Eventually the pattern reveals itself to her as a woman that is trying to escape from the wallpaper as she descends further into madness. When she has her mental breakdown, she realizes that the woman in the wallpaper is herself after she has tried to rescue the woman by tearing off all the wallpaper she could. She then crawls around the room against the remains of the wallpaper startling her husband badly enough to cause him to faint. She then leaves the room by crawling over him. Both of the main characters in these stories have an altered version of reality. In ‘Paul’s Case’ his fantasy life becomes his ‘reality’ and when it is ripped away he acts out to make it his again, which is done so through immoral acts such as lying and stealing that a more sane person would not consider. At the end of the short story, Paul commits suicide and generally speaking, sane people do not commit suicide as Paul did. In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ she is driven to madness by her own mind with no creative
outlet. This idea makes another idea come to light. Both Paul and the unnamed narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper seem to be trapped in their own mind or thoughts. Paul is hopelessly trapped in this fantasy world of the good life and glamour, but he is also trapped in his socioeconomic class. No matter how hard he would have tried, in spite of the fact that he was not the type for working hard, it would have been a difficult task to raise himself to the upper class way of life that he wanted to live. Paul is not as physically trapped as the woman in The Yellow Wallpaper is though. The narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper is trapped in a room with a horrible yellow wallpaper and is forced to stay inside the room and rest. The woman is not allowed to do anything else even in spite of the fact that she does find a small outlet in writing down her thoughts in a journal. She is then trapped in her own mind and with her own thoughts for an extended period of time while already being depressed and nervous. So while both of the main characters are in a way trapped, the ways they are trapped are different. The final parallel that can be drawn is the yellow wallpaper in Paul’s room and in the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper’s rooms. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator is forced to live in semi-isolation in a room with horrible yellow wallpaper. She loathes the wall paper and its hideous pattern. The yellow wallpaper becomes a significant symbol in the story. Once she becomes fixated on it, the pattern changes on the wallpaper to reflect how she feels in her current situation. The woman in the wallpaper crawls and stoops, trying to desperately find a way out of the bars the main pattern of the wall paper makes. This is how the narrator feels, as she is literally trapped in a room with bars on it and all she has the ability to do is look around the room. Eventually when she rips the wallpaper off the walls, she realizes that she was the woman in the wallpaper all along. In Paul’s case, his room in the upstairs of his house has a horrible yellow wallpaper. Considering that ‘Paul’s Case’ was first published in 1905 and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ was published in 1892, the yellow wallpaper in Paul’s room could be seen as a nod to ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. The two stories that were analyzed, ‘Paul’s Case’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, have many differences that many people would not be able to connect. Through the genre that the stories are written in, how both of the main characters are mentally unstable, how each of them are trapped either mentally or physically, and how both of the main characters’ rooms had yellow wallpaper many parallels are drawn. These parallels make the two stories more similar than one would think at face value.
In Alan Brown’s article “The Yellow Wallpaper’: Another Diagnosis”; Brown discusses why Charolette Perkins Gilman published The Yellow Wallpaper as well as another diagnosis on the character in The Yellow Wallpaper. In the article it is explained that Gilman published this short story as a reflection of her own life. Gilman battled depression and sought out help from expert neurologist. The neurologist had suggested that she rest and be confined to her room. This experience lead to the creation of The Yellow Wallpaper. Being confined to a room like the character in The Yellow Wallpaper is enough to drive anyone to insanity. Brown had a different idea on why the character lost her mind and began to believe she was seeing figures in the wallpaper.
The two pieces of writing that will be compared are The Yellow Wall Paper and The Bell Jar. Both these two pieces of writing are very similar yet very, different. The two main characters being compared are Jane from The Yellow Wall Paper and Esther from The Bell Jar. Both of the women in these stories let the expectations of society get the best of them. The expectations of society drive both these women to the point of becoming almost insane. Both these women just want to be as good as everyone else but it just isn’t possible for them. Also these women let others control their fate. These two characters can be very different as well. As society changes Esther from The Bell Jar has more flexibility of what choices she wants to make, then Jane
Have you ever read short stories by ray bradbury? In this essay i will be taking you through the similarities and differences i found while i was reading the three stories. I will also be discussing the characters and how they helped to give a better picture of the settings. Shall we begin.
In conclusion, these stories have similarities in terms of the victimizations and subordination of women. Black and yellow color was used to symbolize the overall surroundings of the situation. However, both of these stories had difference. As mentioned, “The Lottery” was a very violent and cruel event and “The Yellow Wallpaper” was towards self-expression. Thus the difference and similarities in both of these stories can be compared and contrasted.
...he wall, he thinks about his rejected opportunities and his unbearable regret. As he sobers with terror, the final blow will come from the realization that his life is ending in his catacombs dying with his finest wine. The catacombs, in which he dies, set the theme, and relate well with the story. Without the yellow wallpaper in the short story, the significance of the wallpaper would not mater, nor would it set the theme or plot. At night the wallpaper becomes bars, and the wallpaper lets her see herself as a women and her desire to free herself. She needs to free herself from the difficulties of her husband, and from her sickness. The settings in both, set up the elements of the stories and ads to the effect in both of the short stories.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, through expressive word choice and descriptions, allows the reader to grasp the concepts she portrays and understand the way her unnamed narrator feels as the character draws herself nearer and nearer to insanity. “The Yellow Wallpaper” begins with the narrator writing in a journal about the summer home she and her husband have rented while their home is being remodeled. In the second entry, she mentions their bedroom which contains the horrendous yellow wallpaper. After this, not one day goes by when she doesn’t write about the wallpaper. She talks about the twisting, never-ending pattern; the heads she can see hanging upside-down as if strangled by it; and most importantly the
In the story “A Rose for Emily”, Emily Grierson the main character lives in a house where a horrible stench lingers. The stench began at the time of her father’s death thirty years prior. She was rarely seen outside of her home after his death. Her husband was then suspected of “abandoning” her. No one had entered her house for the last ten years nor had Miss Emily left it. The stench was found to be from her father’s dead body and her husband’s of which she had been sleeping with since she killed him. In the short story “Yellow Wallpaper”, the main character Jane was dealing with a slight nervous depression. Her and her husband John rented a small house in the country side in hopes of recovery. Her husband believed the peace and quiet would be good for her. In the house, she is confined to bed rest in a former nursery and is forbidden from working or writing. The spacious, sunlit room has yellow wallpaper with a hideous, chaotic pattern that is stripped in multiple places. The bed is bolted to the ground and the windows barred closed. Jane despises the space and its wallpaper, but John refuses to change rooms, arguing that the nursery is best-suited for her recovery. Because the two characters, Emily and Jane are forced to become isolated, they turn for the worst. Isolation made the two become psychotic. Jane and Emily became irrational due to their confinement. Being separated from social interactions and also their lack of abilities to participate in daily activities caused insanity upon the two characters.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper is partly autobiographical and it illustrates the fight for selfhood by a women in an oppressed and oppressive environment. In the story, the narrator is not allowed to write or think, basically becoming more dysfunctional as she is entrapped in a former nursery room where bars adorn the windows and the bed is nailed to the floor. In this story there is an obstinacy on behalf of the narrator as she tries to go around her husband's and physician's restrictions, however, there is no resisting the oppressive nature of her environment and she finally surrenders to madness even though it represents some kind of selfhood and resistance because it allows her to escape her oppression, "She obsesses about the yellow wallpaper, in which she sees frightful patterns and an imprisoned female figure trying to emerge. The narrator finally escapes from her controlling husband and the intolerable confines of her existence by a final descent into insanity as she peels the wallpaper off and bars her husband from the room" (Gilman, 1999, 1).
The central characters in both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and A Doll’s House are fully aware of their niche in society. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator’s husband believes her illness to be a slight depression, and although she states "personally, I disagree with their ideas,” she knows she must acquiesce their requests anyway (Gilman 1). She says, “What is one to do?” (Gilman 1) The narrator continues to follow her husband’s ideals, although she knows them to be incorrect. She feels trapped in her relationship with her husband, as she has no free will and must stay in the nursery all day. She projects these feelings of entrapment onto the yellow wallpaper. She sees a complex and frustrating pattern, and hidden in the pattern are herself and othe...
William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” are two short stories that incorporate multiple similarities and differences. Both stories’ main characters are females who are isolated from the world by male figures and are eventually driven to insanity. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the unidentified narrator moves to a secluded area with her husband and sister-in-law in hopes to overcome her illness. In “A Rose for Emily,” Emily’s father keeps Emily sheltered from the world and when he dies, she is left with nothing. Both stories have many similarities and differences pertaining to the setting, characterization, symbolism, and their isolation from the world by dominant male figures, which leads them to insanity.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator becomes more depressed throughout the story because of the recommendation of isolation that was made to her. In this short story the narrator is detained in a lonesome, drab room in an attempt to free herself of a nervous disorder. The narrator’s husband, a physician, adheres to this belief and forces his wife into a treatment of solitude. Rather than heal the narrator of her psychological disorder, the treatment only contributes to its effects, driving her into a severe depression. Under the orders of her husband, the narrator is moved to a house far from society in the country, where in she is locked into an upstairs room.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is the story of a woman descending into psychosis in a creepy tale which depicts the harm of an old therapy called “rest cure.” This therapy was used to treat women who had “slight hysterical tendencies” and depression, and basically it consisted of the inhibition of the mental processes. The label “slight hysterical tendency” indicates that it is not seen as a very important issue, and it is taken rather lightly. It is also ironic because her illness is obviously not “slight” by any means, especially towards the end when the images painted of her are reminiscent of a psychotic, maniacal person, while she aggressively tears off wallpaper and confuses the real world with her alternative world she has fabricated that includes a woman trapped in the wallpaper. The narrator of this story grows obsessed with the wallpaper in her room because her husband minimizes her exposure to the outside world and maximizes her rest.
...Also in, "The Yellow Wallpaper", the narrator gets so loneley and so freaked out about what is happening in the wallpaper in her room that she actually goes insane. She tears everything down and she even bites it. She thinks that there are other people that have smudged the wallpaper when in reality it was her and now she is actually the trapped woman. This is how these two stories relate by the characteization of the authors by them both making their stories disturbing in different ways.
In both stories, the protagonists become different people behind closed doors choosing to keep their disappoint hidden from their husbands. However, the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” gives in to insanity and becomes the character her imagination created while Susan in “To Room Nineteen” gives in to her addiction of isolation, letting it take her life. The individuals in these two stories show how easily depression is misunderstood and how easily it is to become
The Story of an Hour, by Kate Chopin, and The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, both have very similar themes, imagery, and a plot with very little differences. In both stories the theme of the two short stories is the ideals of feminism. Some similar imagery is the idea of freedom and living on one 's own. The plots are very similar, both woman coming into conflict with their husband, feminism, and a tragic ending. Also, both deal with the everyday problems women faced during the periods surrounding the time the stories were written. Mrs. Mallard, from Story of an Hour, and Jane, from The Yellow Wallpaper, both are trying to write their own destinies but their husbands prevent them from doing so. Mrs. Mallard and Jane both