Similarities Between The Yellow Wallpaper And Paul's Case

The inner feral nature of mankind is indifferent to rationality when the mind body or soul is trapped and unable to find an escape. Human beings are animals in nature, and often when a situation arises when they are, or feel trapped, they begin to lose sense of rationality and their grip on reality, and instead make unsettling and nonsensical decisions. Within “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “Paul’s Case” by Willa Cather, the effects of a human being being trapped are explored in two different ways through two different people with very different personalities. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a story about a young woman named Jane, who suffers from what she calls a “nervous weakness”, and what she writes about what she goes

Jane describes an interaction between her husband, John, and herself after she asks to visit her cousins, and writes, “But he said I wasn’t able to go, nor able to stand it after I got there; and I did not make out a very good case for myself, for I was crying before I had finished. It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose” (Gilman 80). Jane is not someone who is able to stand up for herself. She is portrayed as weak, and bends easily to John’s will, giving up relatively easily, and just blaming it on the “nervous weakness” while putting herself down. She does not yell, does not fight, just begins crying quietly in the face of opposition. When he returns to school after a night at Carnegie Hall, Paul’s thoughts on how he presents himself are described, “He could not bear to have the other pupils think, for a moment, that he took these people seriously; he must convey to them that he considered it all trivial, and was there only by way of jest, anyway” (Cather 121). Paul considers himself above everyone he is surrounded with, and he makes sure to do everything he can to make it perfectly clear how he feels on the matter. He needs to show the people in his life that he doesn’t belong with them in their mundane little world, because if they believe he does, he just might. The narrator describes Paul’s reasons for lying in school, saying, “He had never lied for pleasure, even at school; but to be noticed and admired, to assert his difference from the other Cordelia Street boys; and he felt a good deal more manly, more honest even, now that he had no need for boastful pretensions, not that he could, as his actor friends used to say, ‘dress the part.’ It was characteristic that remorse did not occur to him” (Cather 126). Paul’s narcissism and selfishness are revealed in this passage. Unlike Jane, who tries