Comparing The Yellow Wallpaper And Young Goodman Brown

Literary Analysis of Short Stories Mental illness plagues communities all around the world. Even fictional worlds, created by people many moons ago, deal with insanity and paranoia. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “Young Goodman Brown,” by good old Nathaniel Hawthorne, are both short stories written in the gothic era where the main characters both end the story in mental anguish and insanity. Although they sound very similar, the themes portrayed are completely different and unique. The two stories are very similar in composition but are different due to their respective differences in message and theme. Hawthorne focuses on calling out the Puritans' hippocratic ways while Gilman focuses on exposing the power a husband had over a wife during the time this story was

She is not allowed to leave her room, she cannot write or draw let alone function as a human all because her husband is a famous physician, and he tells her that if she rests enough it will go away. Gilman writes, “John is a physician, and perhaps-(I would not say this to a living soul.)-perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster” (330). The narrator picks up on her husband's reluctance to trust her illness but she is so afraid to speak out against him because the repercussions would be horrifying. He effectively traps the narrator and keeps her held captive in a room-(which would truly turn anyone who set eyes upon it insane)-where she eventually loses herself to her mental illness and destroys the room. The narrator says, “There comes John, and I must put this away-he hates to have me write a word” (Gilman 331). John, her husband, refuses to let his wife even do something so basic and rudimentary as writing. To be under such a strict dictatorship by someone as close as a husband must be excruciating, but she lives that life all the same. No wonder she goes insane.