Assignment #10- Rose for Emily, Good Man Is Hard to Find, The Yellow Wallpaper

The most prominent theme in these texts is the characterization of the women-- they're all a bit off psychologically speaking. Miss Emily Grierson in "A Rose for Emily" has suffered many hardships throughout her life. Her father passed away leaving her little money and a large house. Because she is without money, she was able to make an arrangement with her financial situation and not pay taxes. Later generations try to get her to pay her debt, but it is not until after her death that they discover the darkness to her character. I believe her "off-ness" is sparked by her fear of men leaving her life. After her father passes away and Homer appears he might leave as well, she takes it upon herself to make sure he never does-- even if that means keeping him as a corpse. In "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the Grandmother's darkness is not revealed to the reader until the end. She, like Miss Emily also conceals a hidden secret-- the infamous convict on the loose, nicknamed MisFit, is ultimately her son. The abandonment of her son infers the Grandmother faced some hardship in her past as well. She also tends to hide things, such as her cat Pitty Sing, from her family. Though I would not classify her as "insane," she definitely has some characteristics that are abnormal. Finally, in "The Yellow Wallpaper, I believe the narrator is the most psychologically disturbed out of all of the women. She takes extreme efforts to hide her true emotions from her husband through journaling. Depression marks her downward spiral as she takes up an obsession with the yellow wallpaper. She initially despises the pattern, but it eventually grows on her. The pattern she makes out of paper parallels her own life. It appears a women is trying to crawl from behind the main figure-- possibly a man? She goes terribly insane and begins crawling herself. Her reality blurs with imagination. In conclusion, secrets suppressed eventually leads to the lead woman's downfall.