Conner Rosenow
Dan Anderson
Intro to Fiction 123
22 July 2010
Interpretive Angle
“The greater the feeling of inferiority that has been experienced, the more powerful is the urge to
conquest and the more violent the emotional agitation.”
-Alfred Adler
Throughout history, women have been considered more emotional and intuitive than
males in the human species. True, it can be partially explained through differences in biological
make-up such as the wiring of neurons that responds to outside influences in males and inner
influences in females (livescience.com). Science, however, is not the motivation to authors when
he or she decides to write a piece of literature which portrays a female character in a state of
emotional angst. Because women are stereotypically in touch with their soft motherly side,
authors will cast them to be characters which experience a breakdown or hardship rather than
males which are stronger by society’s standards. In the three short stories Hills like White
Elephants, A Rose for Emily, and The Yellow Wallpaper, the authors portray the emotions of
females in varying degrees of instability to show how other people, particularly men, have led to
their emotional breakdown.
Opening to a dusty train station during the oppressive heat of the day in Spain, a
travelling couple is seen enjoying drinks while waiting for their ride. The waters are calm on the
surface but a silent battle is going on beneath. While the subject causing a rift in their
relationship is never revealed, comments such as “It’s not really an operation at all” (pg 150) and
“I don’t want anybody but you” (pg 152) makes it clear that Jig, the woman, is pregnant and the
American, her partner, wishes for an abortion. The man, while he may put on false pretenses, is
insensitive towards Jig’s condition and has selfish reasons to get rid of the child. In his mind, a
baby would anchor down his adventurous life and would be a leech; sucking away resources
such as money and enjoyment. Jig is aware of his resentment towards the child and is having a
battle in her mind between whether she should have the baby and pursue a life of motherhood or
lose it all to a man who doesn’t understand her feelings. Jig is a neglected woman who feels
relatively powerless in the situation due to the American’s ignorance and selfishness of the
problem at hand.
Hemingway incorporates symbolism as an essential literary element to understand the
differing mentalities of the two characters. The title itself carries a couple connotations. An
elephant can represent an unspoken issue which is headed the couples way much like the saying
“an elephant in the room.” The large hills also are a symbol of a pregnant woman’s body, the
swollen belly, which is carrying her child. Like the hills, their problem isn’t simply mental but
also a physical force that can’t be ignored. The way which Jig uses white elephants as an analogy
to the hills shows that her mind is already accepting the child while the American doesn’t find
her comment clever and still classifies the baby as a barrier in their relationship. The realization
of what will happen to her relationship with the American if she decides to have the baby is like
an invisible weight closing down on Jig’s world. Her silent suffering makes her a passive woman
as Jig bends to his desires like a servant to its master. He proposes that he will “love her no
matter what” but this is just a fallacy to convince her of the procedure. People have different
ways of coping with pain, and Jig’s solution is to put her life and body into someone else’s hands
so that she can’t be blamed for what happens. She brushes the weight of the situation away from
her as she tries to psychologically convince herself that she doesn’t care about herself at all. The
American in this situation is playing the role of God by deciding not one, but two people’s lives
and Jig encourages his stance by succumbing to his power.
A Rose for Emily takes the next step in exploring emotional instability in women by
making the character suffer from necrophilia, an erotic attraction to corpses
(associatedcontent.com). Once the most beautiful woman in the southern town of Jefferson,
Emily’s father kept her under his wing and never courted her or approved of any men. When her
father died, he took with him the respect of the family and left Emily to live alone in a great
house which became an eyesore for the rest of the community. Emily had bottled up a lifetime of
resentment towards her father who had made every decision for her and eventually released this
pain onto her lover, Homer Barron. Unlike Jig, Emily takes action in the relationship and gains
power by poisoning Homer when he turns out to be gay and “not a marrying man” (pg 165). Her
intensity is a combination of constant suppression from her father and the disappointment of
losing the one man she loved. The pain is too great for her to handle, and eliminating Homer
assures that if she can’t have him, no one will (associatedcontent.com). The men in her life had
beaten down her self-esteem until she reached a strong level of inferiority and this agitation
caused her to take someone else’s life. What makes her case more extreme than Jig’s is the way
Emily goes about claiming power in order to save her relationship. Even if the man is now dead,
Emily has ownership of the corpse and it becomes a physical possession.
Things are getting a little creepy between Emily and Homer…
The third short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, takes a woman’s emotional instability to
the extreme case by causing Jane to suffer from post menopausal depression and then hallucinate
about people in the wallpaper. The reader is exposed to the degradation of her mind as she
escalates from depressed to completely insane. Part of the problem in Jane’s life is the lack of
consideration from her husband, a respected physician. At this point in history, depression after
birth was not recognized as a mental disease and therefore patients were not treated with
adequate care. While her husband cares for her, he isn’t fully convinced of her illness and has
doubts about her symptoms. The irony in the story is how Jane sees a woman behind the hideous
yellow wallpaper that is trying to escape every night after her husband is asleep. The ugly walls
are symbolic of her disease which contains the shadows of another world. The womanly shadow
symbolizes Jane and her attempts to break free from the life and role she is to which she is
confined (associatedcontent.com). These hallucinations show her extreme instability after she
has been denied care from male physicians and her husband. At the end of the story, as her
husband John lays on the floor unconscious, she crawls over him, symbolically rising over him.
This is interpreted as a victory over her husband, notwithstanding that she lost her sanity in the
process. While conformity works for Jig, and murder works for Emily, perhaps insanity is the
solution for Jane since her sickness at this time would never be cured.
Jane finds a mental escape with her wall friends.
Women in literature are often castrated as being the character which is emotionally unstable or
has their perception blurred by the intensity of her feelings. By taking a deeper look into the plot and
studying the influences of other characters in a story, the drastic mood swings and lack of power is often
caused by constant feelings of inferiority. Because of a woman’s position on the social status, she doesn’t
have a voice in situations and is left to mull over the verdict in her mind. Whether this decision is about
her mind, relationship, or body, she is ultimately left feeling powerless and more like an object than a
human. Perhaps it is these episodes of insanity and deep emotional discovery which save women in the
end from problems in the real world.
Anonymous. Patrick Properties. Internet picture: blog.patpropllc.com.
Faulkner, William. Sarah Touborg, E.d. A Rose for Emily. The Hudson Book of Fiction.
McGraw-Hill Companies. 2002. 160-166.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Sarah Touborg, E.d. The Yellow Wallpaper. The Hudson Book of
Fiction. McGraw-Hill Companies. 2002. 16-28.
Hemingway, Ernest. Sarah Touborg, E.d. Hill like White Elephants. The Hudson Book of
Fiction. McGraw-Hill Companies. 2002. 149-152.
Live Science. The Wiring of Neurons. Livescience.com. July 20, 2010.
Sem, Nick. A Critical Analysis of A Rose for Emily. http://www.associatedcontent.com/article
/1760980/ a_critical_analysis_of_a_rose_for_emily.html?cat=38. 19 July 2010.
Smith, Charles. N.d. emilyrose.amount4.moon.philipsproducts.com
Voth, Lori. A Critical Analysis of The Yellow Wallpaper. http://www.associatedcontent.com
/article/14389/literary_analysis_the_yellow_wallpaper.html?cat=38. 19 July 2010.