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Compare And Contrast A Rose For Emily And The Yellow Wallpaper

Decent Essays

Stephanie Rasch
Mrs.
English 1020
8 February 2016

Comparing and Contrasting a Rose for Emily and Yellow Wallpaper

Reading a story about doom and gloom or better yet, a story with gothic elements leaves most readers feeling a bit depressed once they are finished. It may be because the story uncovers memories that the reader had once forgotten, or it could simply be a sense of empathy for the character; this stands true for the captivating writing by William Faulkner “A Rose for Emily”. Faulkner is not alone in is his writing style, Charlotte Perkins Gilman also allows readers to feel these same things in her story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Many upper class women during the Victorian era were seen as inferior than men, and unable to think for …show more content…

Emily Grierson, the main character, had never been the most outgoing woman. Many of the townspeople assumed that the Grierson’s thought they were held to a higher standard than other’s in the community. Faulkner allows the audience to interpret many things throughout the story by leaving open doors and not going into much detail. This allows readers to fall deeper into the story because they begin to imagine things the way they see them. Being socially awkward Emily Grierson stayed to herself for much of her life until she met a man that was doing work on the sidewalk outside her home. Romance formed, and the whispers flew throughout the town. Many suspected that the man that Emily wished to marry had ran off, but years later townspeople would come to find that the man was indeed still with Emily only dead upstairs. What happened to him? Readers can only allow their imagination to …show more content…

"The Yellow Wallpaper" has straight-forth chronology, allowing the reader to understand and experience the events as they happened in an orderly fashion. "A Rose for Emily" has confusing chronology requiring the reader to put the events together themselves and make sense of what happened at the end of the story. Because Emily's life story is told in reverse order and specific dates are not used for events, it creates difficulty in establishing the chronology of her life (Moore 129). Each story tells of how two women descend into madness, one by post-partum depression over a series of timed events and the other by trying to control events that had happened in the past. Although the chronologies of the two stories differ, both stories are effective in portraying what the authors wants the reader to

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