Essay Comparing The Yellow Wallpaper And A Rose For Emily

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Stetson and “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, are two short stories that incorporate both similarities and differences. At first glance, some would think that they are completely opposite. In a sense, they are different. However, as the reader attempts to uncover the meaning behind the stories; They will also discover that each story contains qualities that make them similar as well.

In the “Yellow Wallpaper” when broken down, depicts the story of an unnamed female protagonist facing a difficult time in her life during the nineteenth century. In the care of her physician husband she is soon misdiagnosed with “a temporary nervous depression, a slight hysterical tendency” (Stetson 648). In an effort to overcome her disorder, they have relocated to a temporary rental home for the summer. Unable to leave and explore the outside world she finds herself confined to the walls of her room. Which then contributes to her growing state of psychosis. As her mental condition starts to decline, she finds herself becoming fonder of the yellow wallpaper “a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight” (Stetson 649). Her

Emily Grierson, is a woman who experiences a sequence of bad events during the course of her life. After the Civil War her family fell on hard times. At the age of 30, “When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her” (Faulkner 1). Not long after, the man she thought she would marry deserted her. She soon became fond of Homer Barron who worked for a construction. Emily, is observed purchasing drugs from the pharmacy. When he goes missing, she starts behaving strangely. People soon became more curious about her life and her actions. After her death, they discovered the corpse of Homer Barron in a locked room on a bed where she kept