Struggles of Women Over Time The Yellow Wallpaper written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman will be compared in this essay

with A Rose For Emily written by William Faulkner. Both of them are beautiful pieces of work dating differently : The Yellow Wallpaper written around 1892 and A Rose For Emily written around 1931. Both works tell us how womens roles as mother , wife or daughter oppresses their individualism. There are similarities as well as differences in both these works relating to symbolic details , narrators and their endings. Both the works contain many interesting characters. In A Rose For Emily- Emily is a very real person- many girls can relate to her. A girl born in a noble household brought up by an overprotective father who drove all her suitors away because he thought that no one was worthy of his daughter. When he dies he leaves her nothing but the house. And she rarely leaves this house all throughout her life. She did not get the love of her life- Homer Barron- partly because he was gay, and partly because the townspeople did not approve of their marriage. But she did try to hold on to him- she killed him and continued to sleep with him even forty years later in a bedroom in the attic. She seems to be a person wanting to hold on to her father when he died ( her past- when he dies she refuses to accept it) and Homer Barron ( her present and future) she preserves his body to hold on to him. At first Emily is known to be an alienated spinster, but it is not until at last that the great extent of Emilys problems are also seen. She is a tragic figure, and according to some critics, she is a woman of extraordinary mental strength , some says she is a woman living in tranquil majesty, aloof from the quotidian, some sees Miss Emily as the proud unbending monument of the Old South who somehow triumphs over time and change , thereby evoking admiration conjoned with pity. Her honest trustworthy black servant may know of her heinous crime, but is still keeping quiet and thus proving his loyalty. So he symbolises the loyal and honest servant. To the reader, her love for Homer Barron is the her rosethus the name A Rose For Emily. However critics say that the people of her town, even after knowing her gruesome and ghastly secret has kept it a secretas a final tribute-and that is their rose for Emily. Also, at the beginning of the story, it is said that, Emily lied beneath a bunch of bought flowers they were not flowers by loving and caring hands but simply bought for show. This shows that many people were not in good terms with her. On the other hand, in The Yellow Wallpaper an unnamed woman has been diagnosed with neurasthenia. She is a young wife and a new mother who is not allowed to nurse her child, because she has to take complete rest to get well. She is not even allowed to write or paint. She is confined to an upstairs room that was once a childs room or gymnasium, which contains nothing but a bed which is nailed to the floor, bars over the windows and an ugly yellow wallpaper. She hates the room, but cannot get out of it as well. She increasingly gets obsessed with the wallpaper, and she starts believing that a woman is trapped behind the yellow wallpaper. At one time the reader may doubt the things she narrates in the story. Finally she rips off the wallpaper to help the woman and turns insane herself. The yellow wallpaper itself becomes a symbol of oppression to a woman who feels trapped in her roles as wife and mother. It also points out issues of mental illness and its medical treatment. Surprisingly, even today, medical science hasnt made very much progress in that field. This story shows us just how much she was dependent on her husband and sister-in-law. She is not allowed to do the things she enjoy- she is thus oppressed. Gilmans own claim was, the real purpose of the story was to reach

Dr. S Weir Mitchell, and convince him of the error of his treatment ways. The narrator also symbolises a dependent woman, bound to live by the rules laid down by the Victorian society. The use of narrators in both the short stories are unique. In A Rose For Emily the narrator seems to be the townspeople, or rather the town itself. It sees a whole lifetime and many generations cross by, and seems to be unable to cope with death and decay. It is written in the third-person narrative style. About this it was said, No other contemporary American novelist of comparable stature has been frequently or severely criticized for his style as has William Faulkner. Yet he is a brilliantly original and versatile stylist ( Warren Beck, 53). However in all the five sections, the pronouns keep on shifting and are vague, e.g. from our to they to we. This may seem confusing to the reader. The story, The Yellow Wallpaper is a series of secret diary entries by an unnamed woman who is the narrator. Many argue that the narrator is Charlotte Perkins Gilman herself because she was also diagnosed with neurasthenia after she had her first child, in her twenties. She seems to be speaking out on behalf of all the victimized women of her time. As Catherine Golden puts it, It is more consciously autobiographical than any of her other fictional works, the story expresses Gilmans deep sadness over the lost opportunities for women not allowed to fulfill their own purpose in life (10) . Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman herself said, it was not intended to drive people crazy, but to safe people from being crazy and it worked. Both stories are considered by some critics to be horror and of gothic origin. Both the stories have ended up in the most unexpected way. In The Yellow Wallpaper, just when the narrator starts taking her attention off her imprisonment and putting her attention on the wallpaper, she ultimately goes insane. Like Catherine Golden puts it in One Hundred Years of Reading, The heroines final descent into madness becomes a supreme defiance which ultimately enables her to creep triumphantly over her husband (16). On the other hand, in the story A Rose For Emily just when the reader begins to think that she might actually get married and settle down, she kills him; however the reader doesnt know it until the end of the story. It becomes a great and deadly act of revenge of a woman whom a man dared to disgrace and meant to desert because the lover had robbed her of even her pride ( her father had deprived her of all the hope of an acceptable form of love because of his family pride). Both the stories end up in a completely unforseened way and this is what keeps the reader reading till the end. Finally it can be said that both The Yellow Wallpaper and A Rose For Emily are beautiful pieces of work and they are interesting because many of us can actually relate to them personally- oppressed by the society, or not being able to unite with the person one loves we find examples all around us. However, some critics accuse Faulkner of writing a shallow and exploitative horror story ( Faulkner) and The Yellow Wallpaper as a supernatural tale of horror and insanity ( The Captive Imagination). But now The Yellow Wallpaper is one of the rare pieces of literature we have by a nineteenth century woman who directly confronts the sexual politics of male-female, husband- wife society and in A Rose For Emily it is said that Emily is the symbol of indomitable but dying in Old South in all its decadence, pride, refusal to admit the changing order remains distinguishable, defineable. Although they both differ in time, language and author, the unique wat in which they are written , and their gripping effect on the readers will keep these masterpieces alive for ages and generations. Just like Ben Jonson said, not of an age, but for all time.

Works Cited