Flaubert’s Madame Bovary describes the tragic life of Emma Bovary, an ordinary country girl who grew up to be a woman with false and idealistic visions of romance, love and wealth. In the first part of the novel, readers are introduced to Emma and gains an understanding of her childhood, her naive character and how her unrealistic ideals takes a toll on her physical, emotional and mental states. Flaubert reveals little of Emma’s character until after the wedding where she becomes Madame Bovary, and the reader starts to realize that unlike Charles, Emma already regrets the marriage. “And Emma sought to find out exactly what was meant in real life by the words felicity, passion and rapture, which had seemed so fine on the pages of the books.” (Flaubert 27) This is the first instance in the book where it is suggested that Emma is disillusioned about romance and discontent with her life. She often compares her own life with that she reads in books, without realizing how unreasonable her dreams and desires seem.
The narrator, which suffers of a nervous disorder, is trapped in a place that is supposed to be some kind of a haunted house or an old man asylum. Primarily, the setting is taken place at a lonely room surrounded by yellow wallpaper with a window covered with bars for security reasons. When at first the woman is put into that room it can be clearly foreshadowing by the readers that the room is for crazy people and they can get even crazier in that room. This is exactly what happens to the lady, she feels trapped in the room and starts to see figures of woman in the wallpaper. The story goes by and the setting does not change, that is why the woman goes crazier and starts crawling into the wallpaper trying to help get the woman out.
Three Girls setting. In Three Girls, Joyce Carol Oates puts a great deal of emphasis on the differences between the Strand Used Bookstore and Marilyn Monroe. She describes in great detail that the Strand is dingy, drafty, dark, and in no way elegant. She does this to show that this used bookstore is completely the opposite of the glamorous, gorgeous, and Hollywoodesque Marilyn Monroe. Oates places beautiful Marilyn Monroe against the background of a used bookstore to accent how foreign the girl-poets take her to be.
In comparing both “Hills like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” you find both stories contain a woman repressed by her circumstances. From an emotional standpoint, you could say they are the same, but in reality their situations couldn’t be more different. In “A Rose for Emily, Emily Grierson leads a life of conformity, loneliness, and desperation; while in “Hill like White Elephants,” “Jig”, may too be desperate, but her repression is not caused from loneliness like miss Grierson, but rather by her questionable freedom. Although repression takes on different forms, it is all the same and can eventually leave you consumed and breathless. In “A Rose for Emily”, Emily Grierson lives a secluded, and turmoil filled life which has revolved around inexplicable loneliness characterized by the harsh abandonment of death being that of her fathers.
The wallpaper, a usually feminine, floral decoration on the interior of walls is used to symbolize the sphere because she is unable to break free from the room, like the narrator who is imprisoned and unable to escape without being strangled by the bars of social expectation. The wallpaper is the thing that the narrator exercises her imagination and identifies with a feminist double figure. When John curbs her creativity and writing, the narrator reverses her initial feeling of being watched by the wallpaper and started actively studying and decoding its meaning. She unties its chaotic pattern and locates the figure of a woman struggling to break free from the bars in the pattern. As her insanity gradually deepens, she is preoccupied with one woman behind the wallpaper and identifies completely with this woman, believing that she is also trapped within the bar-like pattern of the wallpaper.
In this amazing poem- The Lady of Shalott is a helpless lady, who is trapped in a tower on the silent Island of Shalott. She is under an unfortunate curse which forbids her to look out of the window towards the beautiful Camelot. The only knowledge she gains is from the reflection of the passing world through a mirror. One day as she entertains herself, weaving a tapestry of excitement that awaits her outside the cold metal bars of the window, she caught a sight a handsome knight passing by. His good looks forced her to say “I’m sick of shadows” and break the curse by leaving the tower, which results to her tearful death.
However, she is cursed to never look out of the window as the curse will awaken. Despite this warning and knowledge of her possible destruction, once the Lady sees Sir Lancelot ride by, she abandons her fear and looks down. Inevitably, she is then struck by the curse that causes her to leave the tower and travel down to Camelot by boat before killing her. The Lady of Shalott's setting is gloomy and colourless whereas the setting in which Sir Lancelot is presented is bright and radiant. The Lady is imprisoned in a tower with "four gray walls and four gray towers" which immediately sets up the image of a prison-like atmosphere.
Coraline The book Coraline is a very surreal book written by Neil Gaiman. The story is about a young girl called Coraline, who discovers a strange world on the other side on a fascinating door. Neil Gaiman has written a lot of other books, for young readers, such as: ‘Mr Punch’ and his best book ever written, ‘The Graveyard’. In this very spooky, fascinating story, Coraline and her parents move into a new house. After arriving at the new house, Coraline wants to explore the grounds, until some bad weather arrives and Coraline gets bored.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote a piece named “The Yellow Wallpaper”, where the narrator of the story is vividly entangled in her imagination causing her artistic impulses to consume her emotions. She is a “closet psychotic” as she does not disclose this infatuation of the yellow wallpaper to anyone around her. Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes a complex story where the narrator is trapped in her secret obsession of unraveling what’s inside this “yellow wallpaper”, which then drives her imaginative creativity, into insanity. The narrator begins by informing the reader how she and her family have recently started to stay in a new house for a little while so she may receive complete rest. This respite was prescribed to her by her husband, a physician.
The wallpaper in the woman’s room represents imprisonment and this is strongly shown when she says, “The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (Gilman). The imprisonment image is created because she repeatedly asks to remove the wallpaper but isn’t allowed and she is evidently trapped in the room, just as the figure in the pattern seems to be trapped in the wall. Gilman also shows how obsessive she has become with the wallpaper and why she is so obsessed when she describes the wallpaper, “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars! The outside pattern I mean, and the woman behind it is as plain as can be”. The woman in the pattern that she refers to is actually her.