By comparing‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ with ‘Hop Frog’ discuss the ways in which the writersportray the central characters.

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By comparing ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ with ‘Hop Frog’ discuss the ways in which the writers portray the central characters.

March 2003                                                                        Olivia Presland

Center Number 19139                                    English Literature Coursework

St. Felix School

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and ‘Hop Frog’ were both written at a time of social turbulence and revolution. Poe wrote Hop Frog twelve years prior to the American civil war, so it is fitting that many of the ideas in the story carry a strong anti-slavery message. Similarly, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ was written in 1892 just before the climax of equal-rights for women. Gillman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is one of the early feminist texts in which her writing criticises the position that women were oppressed into and the ignorance of society as a whole. Both Gillman and Poe attack fiercely these ideas that were both upheld and willingly accepted by the majority of society. These two settings immediately portray the two central characters, a woman and a slave, as two of an unheard minority, who were subjected to an unjust, patriarchal world.

One of the main similarities between ‘Hop Frog’ and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is the atmosphere of each of the stories. Both are horror stories are very dark, and have a horror genre, however ‘Hop Frog’ is also similar to a fairy tale in that it is quite unbelievable, and where Hop Frog’s surroundings are fantasy, the narrator's surroundings are quite real. Despite their differences, both of the story’s surroundings and atmosphere are symbolic of the way the central character is feeling or being treated. For example, gluttony and corruption of the king and his ministers surround Hop Frog and Poe’s darkly vivid descriptions of these reflect the mood of Hop-Frog. The ‘oily’ ministers and a ‘corpulent’ king sound simply grotesque and fill the reader with a sort of stomach churning unease and tension at the treatment of Hop Frog. The corruptness and gluttony is hugely significant as it shows us the danger and easiness of becoming influenced and eventually corrupted by greed and alcohol. The narrator of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ has instead a room. It is describes as having ‘barred’ widows and a ‘nailed down’ bed, which give the impression of a prison rather than a place to become well again in. In fact the room actually does become a prison for the narrator, becoming more and more horrible as the story progresses.

  By the repetitive use of the word, ‘joke’ in the first paragraph Poe emphasises the discomfort of Hop Frog as well as achieving a hugely tense atmosphere. This makes the reader, who realises that this seemingly jovial and harmless behaviour of the king and his courtiers is in fact, a lot more damaging and sinister, feel the tension and discomfort that Hop Frog endures. Like Hop Frog, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ also has a tense atmosphere achieved by the speeded up pace of the story and the very short sentences, which flit from one idea to another. These short sentences show the alertness of the narrator’s mind as well as her increasing madness as she is left with no stimulation other than her own thoughts. As the story progresses the narrator’s madness grows and consequently her surroundings become more and more an extension of her own nightmarish imagination, eventually becoming as fantastical as Hop Frog’s.

Throughout the story, the wallpaper in the room is a metaphor for the narrator’s illness and as her insanity grows, the wallpaper becomes more and more hideous. At the beginning of the story, it is described as ‘horrible wallpaper’. Her initial rejection of the wallpaper, shown when the narrator says; ‘I don’t like our room’ and asks John ‘Let us go downstairs’, is indicative of her want to get better and her rejection of insanity. The wallpaper is described as having a ‘sickly sulphur tint’, representing her illness, and appears to grow, ‘fungus’ and ‘toadstools’ suggests that her illness is growing, whilst ‘Budding’ and ‘sprouting’ suggest the continuity of this growth. Despite the fact that the images of the wallpaper worsen as time goes on, the narrator quickly becomes obsessed by it, spending hours studying it. The narrator describes how ‘It dwells on my mind so’. Eventually, the narrator becomes so mad, that it is as if she is schizophrenic. She begins to see herself in the wallpaper as a ‘woman’, ‘stooping down’ and ‘creeping behind the pattern’. As time progresses, the ‘ faint woman’ becomes clearer and stronger as the narrator becomes weaker. This shows her sane self, losing the battle to her insane self.  Despite the awful surroundings, outside of her ‘barred’ windows lies the garden. In contrast to the wallpaper, the garden represents the narrator’s hope of freedom. The garden is described as ‘delicious’ and where everything in the wallpaper is bad and infectious, everything in the garden is good and healing. However the narrator is locked away with her illness and is unable to reach the garden, which holds the key to her freedom, ‘How I wish he [John] would let me go’ she tells us. This creates dramatic irony, as everyone knows what the narrator needs, including the narrator herself, except the narrator’s own husband John.

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Just as the wallpaper and the narrator’s madness increase as the story progresses, the behavior of the king towards Hop Frog worsens. This is shown by Poe’s descriptions of the king, starting as ‘our king’, turning into a ‘tyrant’ and becoming finally a ‘monster’. By describing the king in this way, the reader is not only made to feel sympathy for Hop Frog by portraying him as a powerless victim of this cruel abuse, but also make us forgive his final act of revenge, which is in fact utterly terrible. The King and his ministers are abusive and exploitative ...

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