Control and Manipulation in A Rose for Emily and The...

In William Faulkner’s â€Å"A Rose for Emily and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper, the two main characters exhibit behavior that some readers may consider unusual or even totally crazy. These two women are having a difficult time adjusting to the many changes taking place around them. In the midst of these changes, they face the struggles of being women such as post partum depression and love and rejection from men. Such problems become so overbearing that each woman ends up in their own delusional world which in turn, leads to their isolation and insanity. Gender issues, love, hate, insanity and isolation, are thematic connections in both stories and are important components of how each woman functions throughout the story and†¦show more content†¦When the woman gets out of bed to investigate the wallpaper in the room, her husband says, â€Å"What is it, little girl? Don’t go walking about like that-you’ll get a cold† (319). His choice of words of calling her a â€Å"little girl† belittles the woman and amplifies her feelings of being isolated, not only physically, but emotionally. Since her husband is away most of the time and leaves her in confinement, the woman immerses herself into studying the wallpaper â€Å"[following] the pattern about by the hour† (317). She follows all the twist and turns of the wallpaper, decoding each detail and discovers what she seems to be a woman in a cage. She spends all her time looking at the paper that she eventually becomes obsessed with figuring out the patterns. She begins to identify with the woman in the cage which could signify her imprisonment in the room and her being tormented by her husband’s lack of sympathy for her condition and his dominance in their marriage. Just as male dominance is an issue for the woman in Gilman’s work, Faulkner’s â€Å"A Rose for Emily† details how Emily’s father and love interest dictate her life. Unlike the woman in â€Å"The Yellow Wallpaper† being dominated by her own husband, Emily Grierson was under her father’s control since an early age. Her, father who was described as â€Å"a spraddled silhouette† and â€Å"clutching a horsewhip†, would chase away any prospective mates for his daughter (Faulkner, 288). Such dominance and solitude carried on untilShow MoreRelatedANALIZ TEXT INTERPRETATION AND ANALYSIS28843 Words   |  116 Pagesthe middle. In still other cases, the chronology of plot may shift backward and forward in time, as for example in William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily, where the author deliberately sets aside the chronological ordering of events and their cause/effect relationship in order to establish an atmosphere of unreality, build suspense and mystery, and underscore Emily Grierson’s own attempt to deny the passage of time itself. Perhaps the most frequently and conventionally used device of interrupting