A Rose for Emily and The Yellow wallpaper are two lamentable tales of tragic women who were driven insane by their dysfunctional families. In Rose for Emily, the aloof, aristocratic bearing of the Grierson in a time when the old Southern Aristocracy had died out prevented Emily from developing a healthy personality and kept her from reaching out and making proper acquaintances with them. Her choice to remain oddly superior and shut out led to very tragic circumstances in the end. The Woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper was not actually insane in the beginning. Instead, she was driven mad by her enforced imprisonment and her lack of any external stimulus besides the infernal Yellow Wallpaper. However, the true cause of her insanity was the Androcentric views of her husband, which denied her rationality and made him substitute his observations of her symptoms over what she really felt.
“I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves.” Tells Emily haughtily when the Jefferson aldermen come to her house and ask her to pay real estate tax on it. In So SHE vanquished them, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. The story says later, after the aldermen failed to reason with her. Truth be told, Emily was the daughter of a Grierson, an old aristocratic family the held itself above the simpletons around them. This was despite the fact that the American Civil War had likely ruined their fortunes, and the changing winds of the Reconstruction were also buffeting the social order in the South. However, her father had insisted that she comport herself as an aristocrat. The effect was the even if the people around her no longer believed in the old order, they still had strange deference for Emily. For example, when she went to buy poison, the druggist was powerless to enforce the law that required her to tell him what the poison would be used for. All she had to do was this ‘Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him an eye for an eye until he looked away. He was completely intimidated.
One of the most severe effects of Emily’s upbringing was shown when her father died. She adamantly refused to allow people to grieve and bury him. In her mad raving, she refused to believe he was dead. One reason for this was because her father’s aristocratic tendencies had driven off all her suitors. Another was because of her father’s attitudes, which were ingrained in her personality, she had no friends, and he was all she had in the world.
Later, when Homer Baron came to Jefferson, she apparently fell in love with him and made all the obvert moves to marry him. Including an interview with a minister and purchasing intimate toiletries engraved with his name. However, tragedy struck, and the full measure of her insanity was not known until her death. Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of ahead. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair. She was so afraid of losing him like she lost her father that, in all likelihood, she poisoned him with Arsenic just so he would stay with her for the rest of her cursed life.
The Woman in the Yellow Wallpaper was not insane. In fact, based on her writings, she was a perfectly normal woman who just had a minor nervous breakdown. A Woman in the later 19th century was trapped in an androcentric world. John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage. She writes as if it was fully expected that a husband would completely ignore the opinions of his wife.
She obviously had a lot of love and respect for John, her husband. For example, she says I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already! Despite her husband downgrading her to the level of a thoughtless, inutile child, she still loves him and wishes to be of help to him. She also respects his opinions quite possibly too much; It is so hard to talk with John about my case because he is so wise and because he loves me so. John’s opinions as a doctor a valid in their own right; however, the Woman is obviously lucid and is capable of diagnosing her own malady. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. She says this understanding that she is in need of some stimuli to keep her brain occupied. Sadly, because of the prevailing attitudes at that time, she never has the chance to express this opinion and instead has to struggle with herself and creeping insanity throughout the story.
In the end, she really does go mad. “I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”. In prison with nothing to do, she eventually lost her mind and imagined that she was trapped in the yellow wallpaper. During her progression into insanity, her husband continued to enforce the “healing” policy that was, in fact, driving her insane, not realizing that the childish, doting treatment he was giving her was the cause of her insanity.
In both stories, the Androcentric attitudes of the late 19th century and the respect the women had for the men in their lives led them to their fateful ends. Emily loved her father and lost him, making her kill Homer so he would never leave. The Woman respected her husband so much she believed him till the end.
Works cited
Faulkner, William. A Rose for Emily.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wallpaper.