Compare the way these texts explore enclosed rooms

Compare the ways these texts explore enclosed rooms

In this essay I plan to compare the way the two poems explore enclosed rooms in very different ways, both poems were written in the late nineteenth century. They use these different techniques to make the reader feel a certain mood, coming from the room/building itself. In a way it creates a feeling of ‘haunting’ or supernatural interference. The two poems that I am going to compare are the Yellow Wallpaper and the Judge’s House.

The first poem that I am going to look at is the Yellow Wallpaper. It is a story about a woman whom is suffering from a nervous breakdown so is taken to an old country house with her husband in an attempt to try to help her clear her mind and ultimately ‘get better’. She is locked up in a bedroom at the top of the house with nothing to do but study the room, mainly the intriguing wallpaper. She notices that this wallpaper has a strange pattern to it and spends all of her time studying the pattern and trying to find where it starts and ends. She grows more and more paranoid of the wallpaper which climates as she starts to think that there is a woman inside the wallpaper and believes that she sees it moving and this is when she begins to go mad. The story is told from the perspective of the woman in the form of a diary. The story was written by a woman who had suffered from a nervous breakdown herself and so the writer can relate to the main character well, this is why, I believe, that the story was written so well.

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The second poem that I am going to look at is, the Judge’s House. The story is based upon a young man called Malcolm Malcolmson whom was travelling in the aim to find a quiet and isolated place to study. When he comes across the Judge’s House, a house which had not been occupied for a very long time, since the old judge had lived there, hence where the name came from, he thinks that it is just perfect. Even though he was warned by several people, including the landlady of the house, not to stay at the house he does so, thinking nothing of the apparent haunting of the building as he sees it as the perfect place to study because most other people were too scared to go near the place. He studies late into the night, with the only noise being the scurrying of rats inside the walls and between the floors. That is until a great, big, fat rat appears on the armchair by the fireplace coming from the bell tower. Suddenly when this rat appears, all the scurrying sounds stop. Malcolmson throws a book at the rat to scare it off, which at least makes it run off, back to the bell tower, along the bell rope. The same thing happens on the second night, the giant rat comes down and the scurrying sounds stop, Malcolmson chases it away. And again, on the third night the rat comes down again, only this time it gnaws at the bell rope, severing it completely. The rat then transforms into the judge himself, whom had once lived at this house and apparently still did. He then started to make a noose from the severed bell rope and puts it around Malcolmson’s neck as he is frozen to the spot by fear. He then hangs Malcolmson.

Both of the texts explore enclosed rooms in very different ways and so there are numerous differences between the two texts, as could be expected. Both houses, however, had been unoccupied for a long time which suggests that there is something strange about the places as they are both, supposedly beautiful houses.

The Yellow Wallpaper room is light, small and airy whereas the Judges House room is very contrasting as it is vast, old and dark as Malcolmson had to take a lamp with him wherever he went. Another difference between the two texts is that the Yellow Wallpaper is written in the form of a diary whereas the Judges House is written as a narrative piece of text.

A major difference between the two is that in the Yellow Wallpaper the woman is forced to stay in the room whereas in the Judges House the character chooses to stay there by his free will. Another significant difference is that, in the Judges House the character is told that the house is haunted and is warned to stay away but ignores this and thinks of it only as a myth as he sees no harm in staying there, whereas in the Yellow Wallpaper the character is the only one to feel ‘something strange’ about the house, but is told that it is nonsense.

The descriptions of the room in the Judges House is mostly about the inside the room rather than the room itself as is done in the Yellow Wallpaper which focuses most of its descriptive text on the wallpaper, this is because there is a lack of objects in the room in the Yellow Wallpaper and because it is light in the room, whereas in the Judges House it is very dark and the character can barely see the walls, he cannot make out the portraits on the wall at first, but there is a lot of objects in the room. More of which he begins to notice as the story progresses. There is also a storm raging outside which gets progressively heavier as the story unfolds, this is another sign of growing fear.

The way that the character notices more about the room, in the Judges House, is similar to in the Yellow Wallpaper as she begins to notice more about the pattern in the wallpaper as the story develops such as ‘a broken neck’, ‘bulbous eyes’ and later of course, the woman trapped in the wallpaper. She begins to feel that she is trapped in the room; this is because of the bars on the windows and the way that the bed is bolted down, making her feel that there is no way out, therefore she spends more time observing the pattern in the wallpaper, and as she becomes more obsessed with it, she begins to feel that the room is closing in on her. This is similar to in the Judges House as he too feels trapped, but only towards the end of the story, by which time it is too late to do anything about it.

In conclusion I feel that both texts succeeded in their goal to explore enclosed rooms and describe the rooms very well. However I feel that both pieces were written with slightly different goals as The Yellow Wallpaper seems to focus upon the gradual deterioration of the characters mental health as she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper, and does not focus on the room itself much. I think this is how it is because it was written from a first person perspective in the form of a diary and by focusing mainly on the wallpaper shows how she becomes obsessed, therefore as she has an obsession she does not focus on other parts of the room as much, this could also be because the room is mainly empty. I feel that the Judge’s house however, as it was written in the third person as a narrative, is more effective in describing the whole room because it does not focus on one aspect of the room alone and so I think that it is more effective in describing the enclosed room.