The Yellow Wallpaper and The Metamorphasis
Work and Isolation The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a short story about a woman named Jane who is suffering from a nervous condition, also known as depression. Her husband is a physician of high standing and agrees that she needs some form of treatment. Her, her husband, and their infant go out to an abandoned house, where she is kept in isolation, to get as much air and rest as she needs. She is not allowed to work, exercise, or do anything, and is treated like an infant. She begins to notice strange things about the wallpaper of the room that she is staying in, and starts to spend a great deal of time focusing on this wallpaper. In the end the treatment backfires and actually worsens Jane’s “condition”, causing her to have a breakdown.
In The Metamorphasis by Franz Kafka, Gregor is a man who works to help pull his family out of dept, when one morning he wakes up transformed into a vermin. After a long hour of trying to get out of bed he manages to succeed in opening up his door to tell his manager, who had arrived at his home due to his tardiness, that he is still capable of working. The entire family shocked by his transformation, reject him and push him into isolation in one room of the house. Gregor becomes very dirty and a pest to the house and eventually dies due to starvation and multiple injuries. The family then celebrates the relief of Gregor’s death, by taking the day off from work and going on a peaceful train ride.
With that being said, in this paper I will focus on how work and isolation affect the main characters and their life alterations. At the time that these two stories take place, if anything you did was out of the ordinary to others you were to get “treatment” to correct your ways, or to set you right. Jane from The Yellow Wallpaper wants to work as a writer. John her husband does not like the idea of this, so he brings her to an abandoned house where he isolates her and she is forbidden to work. Gregor was a man who
In The Metamorphasis by Franz Kafka, Gregor is a man who works to help pull his family out of dept, when one morning he wakes up transformed into a vermin. After a long hour of trying to get out of bed he manages to succeed in opening up his door to tell his manager, who had arrived at his home due to his tardiness, that he is still capable of working. The entire family shocked by his transformation, reject him and push him into isolation in one room of the house. Gregor becomes very dirty and a pest to the house and eventually dies due to starvation and multiple injuries. The family then celebrates the relief of Gregor’s death, by taking the day off from work and going on a peaceful train ride.
With that being said, in this paper I will focus on how work and isolation affect the main characters and their life alterations. At the time that these two stories take place, if anything you did was out of the ordinary to others you were to get “treatment” to correct your ways, or to set you right. Jane from The Yellow Wallpaper wants to work as a writer. John her husband does not like the idea of this, so he brings her to an abandoned house where he isolates her and she is forbidden to work. Gregor was a man who