Comparing Jane Eyre and Yellow Wallpaper

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Similarities Between Jane Eyre and Yellow Wallpaper

There are notable similarities between Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. These similarities include the treatment of space, the use of a gothic tone with elements of realism, a sense of male superiority, and the mental instability of women.

There is a similar treatment of space in the two works, with the larger, upstairs rooms at the summer lodging and at Thornfield Hall being associated with insanity and the smaller rooms below being safer and saner. Gilman's narrator expresses an early desire to move downstairs to a smaller, saner room, but her wish is ignored. Large rooms become haunted rooms in both stories as typified by the room with the yellow wallpaper, the Red Room, and the third floor room beyond which Bertha is confined.

Both works contain gothic elements, but there is a conscious effort on the part of both narrators to dispel the gothic tone with elements of realism. Gilman's narrator begins to describe her eerie summer lodgings, but notes "there was some legal trouble with the heirs and co-heirs... That spoils my ghostliness, I am afraid" (11). Jane likewise is both affected by and resists the supernatural. For instance, she notes along with Grace Poole's fantastic laughter, her affinity for beer. However, the most notable similarity between the two works is the presence in each house of a "madwoman in the attic" (to borrow from Gilbert and Gubar). In the case of Gilman's narrator (unnamed, but with one ambiguous reference that it may be Jane) and Bertha, madness id the result of traditional Victorian marriages, from which both transgress. Clearly implied in Gilman's text and interpretable in Bronte's ...

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...e Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper. New York: Feminist Press, 1973.

Golden, Catherine, ed. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on "The Yellow Wallpaper." New York: Feminist Press, 1992.

------. "The Writing of 'The Yellow Wallpaper': A Double Palimpsest." Studies in American Fiction. 17 (1989): 193-201.

Haney-Peritz, Janice. "Monumental Feminism and Literature's Ancestral House: Another Look at 'The Yellow Wallpaper'" Women's Studies. 12 (1986): 113-128.

Kasmer, Lisa. "Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper': A Symptomatic Reading." Literature and Psychology. 36, (1990): 1-15.

Lodge, Scott. "Fire and Eyre: Charlotte Bronte's War of Earthly Elements." The Brontes: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Ian Gregor. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970. 110-36.

Maynard, John. Charlotte Bronte and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

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