Loneliness to Insanity and Madness in A Rose for Emily...

From Loneliness to Insanity in A Rose for Emily and The Yellow Wall-Paper In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir states that within a patriarchal society woman does not enjoy the dignity of being a person; she herself forms a part of the patrimony of a man: first of her father, then of her husband (82-3). Both Emily Grierson in William Faulkners A Rose for Emily and the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wall-Paper are forced into solitude simply because they are women. Emilys father rejects all of her prospective mates; the husband of Gilmans narrator isolates her from stimulation of any kind. Eventually, Emily is a recluse trapped in a deprecated home, and the narrator in Gilmans story is a delusional†¦show more content†¦After living so long as a victim of loneliness perpetrated by her father, Emily decides that she will be vindicated-she will have her man. She orders a toiletry set to be engraved with Homers initials, purchases an outfit and a nightshirt for him, and buys the arsenic that is to seal his fate. When the townspeople enter her house for the first time in forty years, they find a bridal tomb: a tarnished toiletry set, a neatly pressed suit, and a rotting Homer Baron clad in the nightshirt wearing a profound and fleshless grin (87). Just as the patrimony of a man destroys Emily, it also destroys the first-person narrator of The Yellow Wall-Paper, secluded from both life and reality by her over-protective husband. The narrator is both creative and eccentric; her husband is practical in the extreme (160). She believes that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do [her] good (160). Her husband, however, believes in the strength of conventional medicine such as the rest cure for nervous diseases (164). Like Emilys father who denies her a family and a life of her own, the husband of Gilmans narrator denies not only her desire to write, but also her craving for society and stimulus as she struggles to find a creative outlet (160). This appears a type of solitary confinement for such a creative being, and it should come as no surprise that she is crazed after monthsShow MoreRelatedShort Story Comparison1241 Words   |  5 PagesScales 1! Katrina Scales David Miles ENC-1102 16 July 2015 A Yellow Rose It is likely that after reading short stories The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, any sensible reader will feel disturbed in at least the slightest. Both texts contain neurotic women of unsound mind who have deathly obsessions. At first glance, these stories do not seem to have much in common; they have been written through opposite perspectives, one neglects to be chronological