Comparing The Women In The Nightmare Of Carlos Fuentes And The Yellow Wallpaper

The short stories “The Nightmare of Carlos Fuentes” by Hassan Blasim and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman dive into struggles with mental health, self-identity and reaching out for help. The authors in these stories use literary devices such as symbolization to display deeper meanings that connect the characters to the internalized feelings they are experiencing. This symbolization is a way to track the protagonists’ deterioration due to their mental struggles, these symbols throughout the stories display the inner workings of the characters brains and whats going on just under the surface. The internalization of feelings for both Carlos Fuentes and the women in “The Yellow Wallpaper” convey the root feelings and causes of

The first instance of the protagonist in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” where one can see her internalizing her feelings is in the line “You see, he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?”. This shows that she is downplaying her mental health, that because someone she loves is telling her she’s okay, she’s not validating the feelings she is experiencing. She continues to do this throughout the story, she’s asking for things that she feels will make her feel better like writing or getting out of the house to see family but immediately becomes passive when her husband tells her that it wont help her and that he knows best. The internalization of Carlos Fuentes feelings began with the hatred if his culture and the country he grew up in. it began with Carlos Fuentes changing his name from Abdul Salim Husain, trying to get rid of all evidence of his formal self. Carlos speaks of his country and the people of it in a bad manner, displayed in the lines “had enough of misery, backwardness, death, shit, piss, and camels” and “why can’t we be peaceful like them?”. These thought in his head are him not coming to terms with his own self, his real feelings towards himself and his childhood. This internalization comes into full circle through the dreams he experiences. Depictions of himself not

They started at a “good” time in his life; he had a wife, a good job and felt like “he was the only one who deserved to be adopted by this compassionate and tolerant country”. These dreams began to wear him down, he ate different, acted different and even though his wife noticed, Carlos did not want to tell her of these dreams. He became obsessed, he heavily researched dreaming at first but it became more than research. “His ambition went beyond getting rid of these troublesome dreams; he had to control the dreams, to modify them, purge them of all their foul air”, this infatuation with getting rid of the dreams instead of trying to understand why he was having them made him engulfed in this false reality. His inability to realistically look at his dreams became regrettable, in the dream that led him to his death he saw himself, his old self Salim Abdul Husain. Without thought he tried to kill of his formal self, displaying how this madness of trying to discard his Iraqi identity had led him to discard a part of himself. For the protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, her madness does not stem from a underlying mental illness per say, but from her confinement to a room without her will and the people around her not hearing her out. The protagonists first encounters with the wallpaper are seemingly normal, just an irritating pattern that sticks in her mind due to the many hours spent surrounded by it.