Student Question
What is the common theme in Chopin's "The Story of An Hour," Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," and Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"?
Quick answer:
The common theme in Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," and Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the struggle of women seeking personal freedom against male domination and societal constraints. Each protagonist faces control by male figures—husbands or fathers—that leads to tragic outcomes. Louise Mallard, Emily Grierson, and the unnamed narrator all experience a sense of liberation that ultimately results in madness or death due to their oppressive environments.
The common theme in Chopin's "The Story of an Hour", Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" rests with the desire each woman has for personal freedom.
In "The Story of an Hour," Louise Mallard has an awakening when she learns of her husband's death. Though she tries to deny the knowledge, she soon is delighted that she is free to live her life as she chooses—something she had never thought of. She feels guilty for the sense of release she feels at her husband's death, but embraces her newfound freedom.
There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime...
In "A Rose for Emily," Emily has been controlled by her father—even...
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in his refusal to let her date, believing no one was good enough for her. She has been governed by social expectations of the Deep South that demand constraints because of her gender. But when her father dies, she dates Homer Barron, with no concern for anyone else's opinion:
...we began to see [Homer Barron] and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving […] the ladies all said, 'Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer.' […] [Emily] carried her head high enough--even when we believed that she was fallen.
As an aside, "fallen" here refers to a loss of innocence.
Emily, free from her father's control, is able to do what she wants: having a scandalous relationship with a man, and (worse) with a Northerner!
In Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," the unnamed protagonist is suffering from postpartum depression (PPD, a post-natal depression) something unidentified at a time when women were seen as possessions, and frail creatures requiring control by fathers or husbands. Gilman experienced this herself. "Rest-cure" was the popular prescribed cure of the day...
[It was comprised of] complete bed rest and limited intellectual activity. Gilman credited this experience with driving her ''near the borderline of utter mental ruin."
Suffering from depression after giving birth, the narrator is separated from her child, given a room alone at the top of a rented house (for her recovery), and allowed no mental stimulation. In keeping a journal (which serves as the structural device by which she tells her story), she must hide it whenever anyone is around. Her mental break from reality is brought on by this enforced solitude. First we see her husband's oppression:
John is a physician, and perhaps--(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind)—perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.
You see he does not believe I am sick!
As with male-dominated societies over hundreds of years, a woman's ill health was often attributed to hysteria (see etymology: hysterical).
By the end of the story, the narrator sees people trapped in the wallpaper, and has become one of these people herself.
A desire for personal freedom drives these three protagonists to unhealthy ends: Louise dies of a heart attack when she discovers her husband is not dead—and she is not free. Insane, Emily murders her lover, hides the body in a bedroom of her house for many years, and sleeps with the corpse. And the woman suffering from PPD loses her mind.
Additional Source:
http://www.enotes.com/yellow-wallpaper/author-biography
What common theme appears in "A Rose For Emily," "The Yellow Wallpaper," and "Daddy"?
One common theme that I see is these texts is the domination and infantilization of women by males who drive them mad, in "A Rose for Emily" and "Daddy" by fathers, and in "The Yellow Wallpaper," by a husband and brother.
In "A Rose for Emily," Miss Emily's father has discouraged all suitors, keeping Miss Emily under his thumb until his death and even after, since she is never a true and productive adult, the narrator telling us, "None of the young men was quite good enough..."(2). The townspeople's image is of "Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background...(2) and her father "...clutching a horsewhip" (2). He has made certain that Miss Emily remains a child in her father's house.
In "Daddy," Plath's imagery of her father is dark and frightening. She characterizes him as a Nazi and says,"I have always been scared of you" (line 41). She also calls him a "devil" (line 54) and a "bastard" (line 80). This is a complex poem, but the imagery makes clear that the father is a controlling brute of a man, whom the narrator cannot really escape, even after his death.
In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator has been isolated from the world, confined to a nursery, which symbolizes her infantilization, as the "cure" for her post-natal depression. Her husband, a physician, and her brother, also a physician, have decided this is what she needs to recover. The narrator says her husband "...hardly lets me stir without special direction..." (648) and "...he takes all care from me" (648). When she has a meltdown,
Dear John gathered me up in his arms, and just carried me upstairs and laid me on the bed, and sat by me and read to me till it tired my head (652).
This is a husband who is treating his wife as a child, tucking her in and reading to her at bedtime.
Thus in all three texts, the males are dominating and controlling, bending the will of their women to their own and treating them like children. In all three texts, it is this treatment that drives the women mad, Miss Emily, the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper," and the narrator of "Daddy," who is a stand in, surely, for Sylvia Plath and her sad life and death.