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  • Essay / The role of doubles in The Yellow Wallpaper and Revelation

    The short stories The Yellow Wall-Paper and Revelation were both very interesting reads because the authors used doubles when writing their stories and you can't don't really see how they use them until the end. When you realize they are there, it makes the ending much more dramatic. The doubles help both women in the stories understand something about themselves that they needed to realize. But their ways of doing things were slightly different. There are some similarities between the doubles of the two short stories, but there is also a significant difference. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essayThe narrator's double in The Yellow Wall-Paper was the lady who was trapped behind the wall. The narrator met her double when her husband John moved the family into an old abandoned house. He had brought the narrator here and left her in a room because she was suffering from a mental illness. He didn't want people to see her like this and he also wanted to isolate her because that was how she would get better. In this room, she began to become obsessed with the pattern of the wallpaper. Something about it drove her crazy. You can see the narrator slowly descend into madness because she can't figure out what it is that intrigues her so much about the wallpaper and she becomes even more invested when she first meets the wallpaper layman . One day, she finally understands that she is the woman in the wallpaper. She realized she felt trapped in the home, in her marriage, and in the stereotypes imposed on women. The woman in the wall was just her way of telling herself she was trapped. To solve this problem, she allows herself to go completely crazy, in order to be free. Similarly, in the story Revelation, Ruby Turpin's double, Mary Grace, led her to self-realization. Mary Grace was the opposite of Ruby in many ways. For example, Mary Grace has a lot of anger inside her, but she lets the world know it. Ruby has a lot going on in her but never lets her feelings out because that wouldn't be considered appropriate. For example, she criticizes others and herself. All Ruby wants to be considered high class, so she acts like she thinks she's supposed to. In a way, Mary Grace also has attributes that Ruby wishes she had. Mary Grace is high class because of her wealth and she can also dress well because of her wealth. These are a few things Ruby wants, especially the title. When Mary Grace attacked her in the waiting room and said, "Go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog" (O'Connor 1965, pp. 207), it changed everything for Ruby. She went home and really thought about who she was, but she had no idea. So Ruby's doppelganger really had a big impact on her self-image. His ending was very different from that of the narrator. A notable difference between the two stories would be the doubles themselves. The narrator's double was a projection of herself. The woman in the wall wasn't a real person, it was just the narrator's consciousness trying to communicate with her. So really, the narrator helped herself out of her situation because the double wasn't real, he was just guiding her. Ruby's double was a real person, but I don't think she was herself at the time. At the end of Revelation, when Ruby had her own revelation about herself, a light shone in her eyes that allowed her to reconcile with.