Essay on Escape in A Rose For Emily and Yellow Wallpaper

Escape from Reality in A Rose For Emily And The Yellow Wallpaper In the Victorian era, women were thought to be weaker than men, thus prone to frailty and female problems. They were unable to think for themselves and only valuable as marriage material. The women in Faulkners A Rose for Emily and Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper are driven insane because they feel pigeonholed 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 Johns 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,†¦show more content†¦Both women love the men that control them, however, and would most likely insist that there was no abuse of any kind, emotional or physical. Though there may not have been abuse in the sense the word is used today, those men caused trauma in their women, which is borne out by the violence of the insane actions of these ladies. The two women retreat into their own universes as an escape, to figure some way out of the pain that their men have inflicted upon them. Emily retreats physically into her own home, for almost six months she did not appear on the streets and the front door closed upon the last one and remained closed for good (p. 507, 508). On the contrary, the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper retreats into her own mind and the world of the yellow wallpaper, which gradually takes over her life until she can think of nothing else. Both women, however, create a fantasy life in which they truly live, Emily as Homer Barrons wife, Ms. Yellow Wallpaper as the woman who would always lock the door when I creep by daylight (p. 639). In these created worlds, they are free from the men who have ruined their lives. However, merely being free to fantasize in their minds is not enough; they also demonstrate their freedom in highly unpredictable ways as acts of rebellion, convincing the sane world that they are truly mad. Emilys act of rebellion is simple but gruesome. She kills Homer Barron with arsenic andShow MoreRelatedComparison and Contrast of the Yellow Wallpaper and the Rose for Emily1078 Words   |  5 PagesParis Claypool Eng 120 Essay 1 06/12/2010 A Rose for Emily and The Yellow Wallpaper â€Å"A Rose for Emily’’ By William Faulkner and â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman,† are two short stories that both incorporate qualities of similarities and difference. Both of the short stories are about how and why these women changed for lunacy. These women are forced into solitude because of the fact that they are women. Emily’s fatherRead MoreShort Story Comparison1241 Words   |  5 PagesScales 1! Katrina Scales David Miles ENC-1102 16 July 2015 A Yellow Rose It is likely that after reading short stories The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, any sensible reader will feel disturbed in at least the slightest. Both texts contain neurotic women of unsound mind who have deathly obsessions. At first glance, these stories do not seem to have much in common; they have been written through opposite perspectives, one neglects to be chronologicalRead MoreCriticalpaper And A Rose For Emily1653 Words   |  7 Pagesthose nineteenth-century social issues. Even though Faulkner wrote his story, â€Å"A Rose for Emily†, 40 years after Gilman’s story, â€Å"The Yellow Wall-paper†, both stories portray several types of nineteenth-century social issues accurately. Because of their knowledge about these social issues, Gilman and Faulkner were able to portray the main characters’ struggles. Both main characters of these stories, the narrator and Emily, become oppressed by their social environments because of the expectations thatRead MoreANALIZ TEXT INTERPRETATION AND ANALYSIS28843 Words   |  116 Pagesthe middle. In still other cases, the chronology of plot may shift backward and forward in time, as for example in William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily, where the author deliberately sets aside the chronological ordering of event s and their cause/effect relationship in order to establish an atmosphere of unreality, build suspense and mystery, and underscore Emily Grierson’s own attempt to deny the passage of time itself. Perhaps the most frequently and conventionally used device of interrupting