William Faulkner & Charlotte Perkins Gilman

A comparison and contrast of Faulkner's Miss Emily and the narrator in Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper reveals the often negative and diminishing impact on women of living in a male dominated society and culture.

Set against the backdrop of the turn-of-the-century South, A Rose for Emily is a story of isolation, loss, gossip, the conflict between old and new, and even possible murder. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper is partly autobiographical and illustrates the fight for selfhood by a woman in an oppressed environment. Both of these female characters suffer from maintaining an image, role, and ideal that is imposed on them by men in highly patriarchal societies. However, the impact of such an environment manifests different challenges and behaviors in each. In the case of Miss Emily, she is from a proud, older era in the South where women were considered the "fair" sex in all ways. This included being a lady, having one's virtue and honor defended and defined by male relations, and a refusal to admit weakness or deficiency in public. Like the proud, stubborn house in which she resides, Miss Emily is a symbol and relic of a past way of life that has passed her and society by a long time ago. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator is more of a feminist than Miss Emily could be, but she still suffers a nervous breakdown from the confining pressures of her "inferior" position compared to men