Sympathy for Characters in The Yellow Wallpaper and The Nightingale and the Rose”The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “TheNightingale and the Rose” by Oscar Wilde, are two stories in which theauthors induce a great feeling of sympathy in the reader. Usingcharacter personality, circumstance, language and narrative style,both authors encourage us to sympathise with the main characters in athought-provoking and often unexpected manner.
The main character in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the narrator, whosename, we learn at the end, might be Jane. The reader sympathises withthe narrator largely due to her situation. She suffers, it is implied,from post-natal-depression. As she recuperates with her neurasthenia,she is not allowed to do anything but rest, she has “a scheduleprescription for each hour in the day” and is especially forbiddenfrom the creative work of writing. Moreover, the narrator is confinedto an unpleasant and threatening room, one she strongly dislikes. Shestates “I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long”.The narrator grows progressively insane, up to the very end of thestory, where she is found to have locked herself in her room, and iscircling it, creeping. The reader sympathises greatly with thenarrator in this situation, not merely because she is ill, but alsobecause of the ‘cure’; she is disallowed to do the things she loves,and – as is evident at the end of the story – this is extremelydamaging for her.
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Alongside the narrator’s situation, her personality produces sympathyin the reader. The narra…
…allpaper, the sentences grow choppy andconfusing, grafting together disconnected one-line comments, such as:
“I quite enjoy the room, now it’s bare again.
How those children did tear about here!
This bedstead is fairly gnawed!
But I must get to work.”
The narrator’s tone changes from naive and depressed to paranoid andexcited, and, as she grows insane, her sentences reflect the state ofher mind; she regularly contradicts herself. Towards the end of thestory, the narrator changes the topic often, but never fails to returnto the subject of the wallpaper, thus exposing her obsession with it.The narrative style induces sympathy, as it shows the reader thedeterioration process of the narrator’s mind, as she is prevented frommaking her own choices in life, bound by the ties of a patriarchalsociety.
