Two Stories Essay
Mrs. Bailey
“Lamb of the Slaughter” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” are both short stories that tell a twisted tale. In “Lamb of the Slaughter”, a wife kills her husband once she realizes that he no longer loves her. She grabs a lamb leg and blows her husband over the head, killing him. She then creates a devious plan as a cover story for his death, with the cops ending up eating the evidence. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, a couple moves into a home, and the wife is stuck with staying in a room, covered with yellow wallpaper. Soon, she begins to lose her insanity and starts to love the wallpaper while her husband faints with shock when he finds her creeping around the room. There are many ways that these two stories are the same. Both characters lose their sanity, end up being cruel to their husbands, and being sane from the beginning but end out as completely different characters.
One way that these two characters are alike is that they both lose their sanity. In the story Lamb of the Slaughter, Mary attacks her husband, killing him with a lamb leg. When she does this, she doesn’t feel any guilt or think something like, what have I done? No, she just stands there, looking at him dead on the floor. Normal people who killed their husbands would feel at least a small bit of guilt, but not Mary. The quote “It was extraordinary, now, how clear her mind became all of a sudden” shows how she was just thinking, ok, so I have killed him. What do I do now? It helps the reader to know that she is clearly insane, and she doesn’t sound guilty to those cops that come in the house, and she even giggles when they eat the evidence. In The Yellow Wallpaper, Jane becomes insane when she has to be cooped up in the small room and meets up with the wallpaper. As she sinks further into her imagination of the yellow wallpaper, her real life becomes more and more distant from her. She begins to see a woman in the...