Compare And Contrast A Rose For Emily And The Yellow Wallpaper

Katie Markham

Professor Kidd

English 1302

April 6, 2015

Compare and Contrast “A Rose for Emily” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” Essay

“A Rose for Emily” by Emily Faulkner and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, take on the topic of living in a society dominated by men. The difference between the two works is the extreme way the protagonists react to their male-dominated antagonist. Both works undergo the ongoing theme of women rejecting the male-dominated society. This is seen in both works in the way the protagonists are isolated, how they share the same social class struggles, and how both have a dominant male antagonist. “A Rose for Emily” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” take place within families of the same social

Both of the protagonists reject this social norm when they refuse to abide by their superior male to do what they want to do. Emily Grierson was from the Old South “a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head” (Faulkner 517). The author, William Faulkner, describes how Miss Emily depicts to the audience that she no longer associates with the New South town she lives in currently. The way Miss Emily dresses symbolizes her rebellion towards society, which is dominated by men. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the family thinks they live a standard life, but in fact they are not normal because there is a housekeeper and a nanny at the residence. The narrator may live in a certain social class and have these

This feeling they have is because neither woman is trusted to be independent. Instead of feeling protected, their domineering man puts them into solitude where they go mentally insane. “He is careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction” (Gilman 479). Gilman included this sentence in “The Yellow Wallpaper” to show that the narrator is not accepted to be independent and that her husband does not trust her to be by herself. In “A Rose for Emily”, Emily is summoned to her house where she is isolated from the town she lives in. Her father isolated her from the young men attracted to her, because he thought he was protecting her, “We remembered all the young men her father had driven away…” (Faulkner 518). Neither woman is trusted to be independent and therefore has to have a housekeeper to keep an eye on them. Feminism and isolation is a common theme in literature because feminist support the equality of women, but in this time the women were not accepted as equals and therefore went into a feeling of isolation. Society treated women in an unrealistic way and therefore the protagonists took it upon themselves to find their identity through it. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, John, the husband of the narrator, uses his occupation of being a doctor to inform his wife that he knows best about her and her illness. The two coincide in these stories