The Yellow Wallpaper and The Turn of the Screw - Essay Example

It was at such a time that two authors tried to put forward their thoughts regarding the situation of females in the world. Charlotte Perkins Gillman and Henry James have both used their literary works to portray female protagonists as individuals who are suffering at the hands of the society. Both these literary works were published in a time when the feminist movement was about to start. In one way or the other the authors have portrayed a downfall of the female protagonists in both the literary works with regard to their downfall in the real life.

This essay would further compare the ways in which these female protagonists have been portrayed within the works (Henry 2008; Gilman 1973). The Yellow Wallpaper is a story written by Gillman that revolves around a female who is having some psychological problem after her marriage and delivery. She is the wife of a physician who believes that she is struck into a neurological disorder after giving birth to a child. Due to her neurologic stress she has been advised to be bed ridden without doing any sort of work.

However this stress gets up to her and she starts writing about the things that are around her. She notices this yellow wallpaper in her room and begins to get menacing thoughts about it. It is here that female protagonist in this work is about to go down. Noticing the wallpaper has brought a change in the life of the female protagonist as she keeps wondering about it. . In the end she tears off the whole wallpaper of the room and starts running inside the room in circles. It is here that her husband enters to find her in this condition and gets unconscious soon after (Gilman 1973; Thrailkill 2002).

Similarly The Turn of the Screw is written by Henry James which revolves around a female protagonist serving as a governess for two children Flora and Miles. While she is serving these two children she witnesses some kind of evil forces acting against these children but does not try to remove them. She sees the ghosts of the previous governess who used to work in the same house and a valet. When she witnesses these ghosts for the first time the downfall of the character can be clearly witnessed in the story.

In the end she does not try to avoid these ghosts and rather ends up in getting Miles physically damaged by these ghosts (Henry 2008). It can be clearly seen that both the protagonists in the story are somehow mentally ill as they can see things which are not present at the moment. In the Yellow Wallpaper the protagonist visions a woman inside the wallpaper even though she is not even present in there. She envisions herself in the wallpaper as she thinks that she is being trapped by the world of the worldly pleasures.

Similarly the protagonist in The Turn of the Screw also witnesses these ghosts which are denied by other people. She is losing her vision about reality as she is getting into her own world. In the Yellow Wallpaper the female protagonist envisions different things about the wallpaper which do not exist. She tries to scratch the wallpaper because of the different shapes that it transforms into. Although the wallpaper remains same in the story she believes that the wallpaper keeps changing under