The Role of Chronology in Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and Faulkner's A Rose for Emily

The Role of Chronology in Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and Faulkner's A Rose for Emily

Chronology is the sequence of time as it occurs in events. The chronology of a story is important in order for the reader to understand the work of literature. Many stories, such as "The Yellow Wallpaper" written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, have chronological events that happen in sequence, in order of the time they happened. Other stories, such as "A Rose for Emily" written by William Faulkner, have complicated chronologies. Faulkner uses "a complicatedly disjunctive time scheme that twists chronology almost beyond recognition" (Qtd. in Moore). His story begins with an event happening in the present, regresses to an earlier event, and finally returns to the initial event. This sometimes confuses the reader. Although "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "A Rose for Emily" have different chronologies, each story's chronology affects how the reader is able to understand the work as well as the order in which the events happened.

Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" has a basic and simple chronology that tells a story in an ordered time line. The protagonist Jane, also the narrator, tells the story in present tense, just as it is happening to her. The story is an "account of a woman's gradual decent into madness" (Bak 1). It starts with the narrator telling the reader "it is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer" (Gilman 13). Jane and her husband rent the summerhouse in order for Jane to rest and recover from a slight depression. Jane is isolated in an upstairs nursery in a colonial mansion three miles away from the village (Bak 1). As the story progresses, the reader is able to see what Jane goes through while isolated in the house. The next instance of time that Jane mentions in the story is the passing of the Forth of July (Gilman 17). As time progresses to the end of summer, the reader is able to see how time in the house has caused Jane's condition to deteriorate. The story ends in a mystery, but the reader is allowed to see how the story unraveled in an ordered chronological time, which makes the story less confusing.