A Rose for Emily vs. The Yellow Wallpaper
The term “madness” means the quality or condition of being insane. Now what degree or genre of insanity is the question. In the short stories “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, two women’s lives are shown and described by the author depicting a form of “madness” for each. “A Rose for Emily” is a disturbing tale of an old maid, driven to seize for that which she is robbed. Her controlling father takes away any chance of her forming a life outside of him by secluding her from others, and when he dies, she is left with no one. Alone and betrayed, she eventually meets a man, but finds out he is not interested in being committed with her. Faced with the thought of having a solitary life again, she takes action.. She ties him to the bed until death and the town later finds out she has been sleeping next to him even after his death. .In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator is driven to insanity by her husband’s disregard. He denies that she is not well, and locks her in a room with no freedom or pleasure. In personifying the wallpaper in her room, she finally escapes her husband’s grasp on her, but in doing so, she also escapes reality. Although the two women are both mentally unstable, there are some parallels as well as dissimilarities.
“A Rose for Emily” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” were both written during the same era. In the 19th century woman were thought of as a lesser sex to males both physically and mentally. 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 which is symbolic because during this time men confined the women so to speak The men were the superior sex during this era. This lack of care contributed to why these two stories and the protagonist’s insanities are so similar. In “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner presents this character that growing up was...