A Rose For Emily And The Yellow Wallpaper
5 Pages 1250 Words
Compare and Contrast: A Rose for Emily and The Yellow Wallpaper
William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” are two short stories both incorporate qualities of similarities and differences. Both of the short stories are about how and why a woman changed from loneliness to lunacy. These women are forced into solitude merely because of the era they are woman. Emily’s father rejects all of her prospective mates; the husband of Gilman’s narrator isolates her from stimulation of any kind. Eventually, Emily is a recluse trapped in a deprecated home, and the narrator in Gilman’s story is a delusional woman confined to her bedroom. These stories both entail numerous similarities in the characterization, setting, and symbolism. A major difference of these two short stories is the point of view they are written in. A Rose for Emily is written in third person and The Yellow Wallpaper, is in first person, which creates two extremely different outlooks.
The women in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" are driven insane because they feel confined by the men in their lives. They retreat into their own respective worlds as an escape from reality, and finally rebel in the only ways they can find. Emily and 'John's wife,' the woman in "The Yellow Wallpaper" who is never named, both feel stifled and suppressed by the men in authority over them. Emily, as a "slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip”, is prevented from having suitors by her father, “none of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such”. The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" talks much about how her husband, John “takes all care from me.” Although the directions he gave are to rest completely and not to pick up a pen. "John is a physician, and perhaps that is one r...