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At some level most human beings follow a common mold, in which society has created to shape citizens during their stages of personal development. However society sometimes tries to pressure those who do not follow this mold, by changing them or forcibly removing them. Within this society that uphold this common mold there is a hierarchy of obsessive qualities, some of which are admired and others which are scorned and deemed to be in the realm of dysfunctionalism. Herman Melville and Charlotte Perkins Gilman emphasis on the latter part of these obsessive fixations in their writings. In examining the stories “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” it is clear that they show that obsessions can result in someone’s demise, specifically if it is inflicted by oppression.

In both stories, the main characters become ostracized by others, and a theme of social deviance comes into play, emphasizing the metaphor of society vs. the individual. Although the result of this is equal in that the characters become obsessively fixated to escape their subjection, both leading to disastrous ends, each character submits to a different fixation, one being the opposite of the other. In the Yellow Wallpaper the narrator is suffering from depression and has been prescribed the “rest cure” by her physician and husband and being a creative woman, she finds isolation suffocating and searches for focus that she finds in the wallpaper. In Bartleby the Scrivener, Bartleby is a character that holds an aesthetic to only performing a single action in exclusion to everything else, this is his obsession. These stories reflect the effects that obsession can change in a person’s character to the extent that drives away the truth and realism in their va...

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...f the meritorious nature of Bartley’s work. Eventually, Bartleby shifts his obsession to something else, doing nothing at all. Of course, this kind of fixation is not acceptable in society and one that does this will be punished. The narrator feels he cannot successfully continue his business because scrutiny from his peers with an “intolerable incubus” who was “denying authority; and perplexing visitors; and scandalizing [his] professional reputation; and casting a general gloom over the premises.” Finally, Bartleby is taken off to prison where he truly does nothing, not even partaking in the basic functions required to sustain life. The narrator finds his in the culmination of his final obsession, huddled in the corner starved to death. Bartleby is an extreme example of a character trying to achieve his individualism in society and to fail, the price being death.