Protest Against Masculine Discrimination In Faulkner's A Rose

Madness as Protest against Masculine Domination in Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” The patriarchal system is one of the foundations of Western civilization, being based on Christian beliefs regarding men and women’s proper roles in the society and in the domestic sphere. In her short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Gilman makes a feminist statement by illustrating the failures of the patriarchal system, which condemns women to silence, isolation and decay. In the short story, the male character is twice a representative of this system, as a husband who dominates his wife privately, and as a physician who is able to dominate women in the public sphere, by imposing his judgements and prejudicial
In The Yellow Wallpaper, the stream of consciousness technique provides a much more intimate connection with the character, and a deeper understanding of the process of passing from sanity towards madness. For example, the narrator explains that, “it is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight. Just this nervous weakness I suppose” (Gilman 2013, p. 491). This personal confession allows readers to identify with the character, and to feel sorry for her slow decay into madness, which her husband does not notice. In the case of A Rose for Emily, the story is told from the perspective of a community member, who knows as much as all the others about Emily. In fact the use of the plural form of the first person, for example when stating “at first we were glad that Miss Emily would have an interest (Faulkner 2013, p. 1001), suggests that the story is told from the perspective of the community, which acts as a collective character. However, the community’s circumstantial evidence for murder, such as buying arsenic, the horrible smell, as well as the prolonged self-imposed isolation, are enough for readers to take guesses in order to fill the rest of the story. Whereas in The Yellow Wallpaper, the readers are left to imagine what happened next, and whether the narrator got better or not, in
Hume (2010) suggested that madness freed the narrator from the imposed self-control towards which her husband insisted. The author thus described the protagonist as “a woman suffering from the final and grotesque delusion that she has gained freedom from her domestic situation by literally ripping the paper off her walls “(Hume 2010, p.6). Therefore, the protagonist’s madness completely freed her from the need to obey her husband, as prescribed by the patriarchal