This essay compares William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (1930) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), two short stories that illuminate the experiences of women in their respective historical moments in the United States. The paper examines how each author uses symbolism — particularly the house as a recurring motif — as well as differing narrative perspectives and structural techniques to portray female suffering and societal constraint. While Faulkner employs third-person narration, rich description, and foreshadowing, Gilman uses first-person interiority and fragmented prose to draw readers into a character's mental breakdown. Both stories ultimately depict women trapped by social expectations, escaping only through death or madness.
"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner (1930) and "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892) are both intimate stories about women living in their particular times in the United States. Both provide genuine insights into what it was like to be female during these historic periods. However, the styles of the two authors make the stories very different in their approach and effect on the reader.
"A Rose for Emily," told in five separate sections, is rich with the descriptions, plot structures, and mood that made Faulkner such a dynamic and memorable writer. After only a few lines, the reader is transported into that period and place. For example, when reading the second paragraph, one can easily imagine the look and style of the house:
"It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps — an eyesore among eyesores."
Yet Faulkner goes beyond describing the house by itself. He uses symbolic writing to compare the house with its owner, as if they had become one — which, ironically, they had. Although a "slender woman in white" who held her head high and proud when young, Emily later grew fat, gray-haired, and old. Like her house, she is aged, graying, and decayed.
Even the "rose" in the title carries a number of symbolic meanings. In its prime, the rose is a wondrous sight; however, it does not last long but shrivels up and soon loses its fragrance and beauty. It is also a symbol of love, which, in this story, also withers and dies. During the Middle Ages, the rose was a symbol of martyrdom — another way to interpret Emily's life. A rose is also something placed on a grave, a foreshadowing of what is to come, which is another of Faulkner's literary techniques.
A third-person narrator tells the story through a series of flashbacks and moments of foreshadowing. Throughout the tale, this storyteller moves back and forth through events in the tragic life of Emily Grierson and her town. The pieces of the story are interwoven, just as Emily's life is interwoven with the lives of the townspeople.
Finally, there is Faulkner's ability to create mood in so few words — in the case of the ending, just a strand of hair. Who cannot feel sorrow, pity, and yet disgust for Emily? "Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. 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."
"The Yellow Wallpaper" is another story about what is expected of women. Both stories show the suffering of women because of the way they are treated — indeed, mistreated and victimized — for wanting a different life than the prescribed norm. In Gilman's story, the narrator, a new mother, is told to abandon her writing and intellectualism. She does not even have an identity of her own, remaining nameless throughout.
Whereas Faulkner moves his story forward with detailed description and third-person narration, Gilman carries the reader into the action through ongoing first-person thoughts and comments. Readers learn about Emily through the eyes of a narrator and the townspeople; they learn about Gilman's character directly from her own thoughts and fantasies. By the end of the story, the reader is inside her mind, feeling her mental breakdown, obsession, and fight against insanity.
"Houses as protection versus confinement in both stories"
"Fragmented prose mirrors narrator's deteriorating mind"
"What is the matter?" he cried. "For God's sake, what are you doing!"
I kept on creeping just the same, but I looked at him over my shoulder.
"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!"
Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!
Both women have finally escaped — one through Gothic death and the other through madness. Together, these two stories stand as powerful literary testaments to the social constraints imposed on women in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, and to the devastating personal costs of those constraints.
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