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The Yellow Wallpaper Magical Realism Essay

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Throughout our time in class, we’ve studied a variety of authors and genres of short stories. One genre in particular that stood out to me is magical realism. Ann Charter defines magical realism in The Story And Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction (Ninth Edition) as “fiction associated with Latin America that interweaves realistic and fantastic details, juxtaposing the marvelous with the ordinary.” Although magical realism originally began exclusively apart of Latin American history, it has branched out and become apart of many of our favorite stories and films today. On the other end of the spectrum is realistic fiction. These stories have a very genuine possibility of occurring in real life and are usually just an elaborate or …show more content…

By taking situations many have personally experienced or know someone who has, realistic fiction authors are able to reach their readers on a deeper level. Charlotte Perkins Gilman has expressed she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” because of her own personal battles with mental illness in an attempt to prevent others from “going mad”. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman introduces us to a mentally ill narrator. The narrator is the wife of an established physician and forced to “rest” in a room covered in tattered yellow wallpaper and bars so that she can cure herself of her disease. Throughout the story we follow the narrator through her days in this room and see her eventually be driven to …show more content…

Authors of realistic fiction have way less leeway creating stories that deviate from the assumed path, like the ghosts the narrator begins to see in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Although both magical realism and realistic fiction create relatable comprehendible stories, magical realism authors are able to tell their readers what the rules are and what is real in their stories, where realistic fiction authors must stick to the rules of the “norm” and anything seemingly out of the ordinary is automatically assumed to be

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