preview

What Are The Similarities Between A Rose For Emily And The Story Of An Hour

Decent Essays

The Hour for Emily
In the short stories A Rose for Emily and The Story of an Hour, Emily Grierson and Louise Mallard are both similar women, in similar time periods but they both are in entirely different situations. This essay will take these two specific characters and compare and contrast them in multiple, detailed ways.

A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner is a short story with third party narration, centered on the main character, Emily Grierson. She is suppressed by her father, life expectations and community interest in her life. The reader gets a sense that Emily cracks under all the pressure and they soon realize after her death, when she is in her seventies, that she did in fact have a mental disorder.
The second story in …show more content…

The expected life style of women in that this period was; cooking, cleaning, mingling, taking care of the male and other sexist responsibilities. In some cases these women had servants to help with their female duties in the household. The woman in this time in history were always the inferior to the males. This can be noted in Emily’s situation with her controlling father and again with Louise because the reader gets a sense of inferiority and that she does not want to continue living with her husband. Male dominance is depicted in both of these short stories.
In addition, both women in this time setting were also expected to be wed by their middle ages. In a Rose for Emily, the main character never married. The reader gains the impression that she did, in fact, want to be married and accepted. Emily longed so much to be happy with a man that she seemed to take it to the extreme. Louise made it overwhelming clear in The Story of an Hour, just how extremely happy she was to be set free from her marriage. The reader has the sense that there were other events and or actions that took place within the marriage that caused Louise to become so extremely excited to just imagine life being single. Louise was in fact, bonded by marriage, while Emily was sadly bonded in solitude.

Next, the characters Louise Mallard and Emily Grierson are similar is their own progress throughout the two different stories. At the start of both stories, the writers made it

Get Access