The short story “Araby” is about an unnamed young boy living with his aunt and uncle in Dublin, Ireland. The boy lives on a quiet, blind street with several houses and the Christian Brother’s school, which the boy attends. He likes looking through the belongings left behind by the former tenant of his house, a priest who died in the back drawing room. The boy describes his wintry nights in the dark street playing with his friends until Mangan’s sister comes out to get Mangan, one of his friends. It is during these brief interactions that the unnamed boy begins to notice her physical appearance and develops a crush. He later then becomes infatuated with her and he starts to think of her all the time, he even imagines carrying her like a “chalice safely through a throng of foes.” The boy doesn’t bother to try and talk to the girl, but instead finds satisfaction by daydreaming about her. One day he goes into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died and Mangan’s sister speaks with him, she asks him if he is attending the Araby bazaar which she then tells him she can’t attend due to her convent having a retreat, hearing this the boy jumped to the opportunity and promises the girl that he would get her something from the event if he were to go. By this time his fantasies increase, and not only did he fantasize about the girl, but he now fantasizes about the araby bazaar which leads him to lose focus in school and he starts to feel like his teachers are getting stricter with him. On Saturday morning he reminds his uncle about his plan to go to the Bazaar, but as time passes, around 9 pm, his uncle still has not arrived home, and he starts to get anxious. By the time his uncle arrived home, he had forgotten about the boy’s plan and he also made him late for the event, so when he finally arrived at the Araby bazaar it was shutting down and he could not get anything for Mangan’s sister. Disillusioned by what he sees at the bazaar, the boy finally sees himself as readers have seen him for much of the story. He realizes his vanity and foolishness, his unprofitable use of time, the futility of life in Dublin, that Mangan's sister likely has no interest in him, and that there is no magical 'Araby' in Ireland. (Wesley, Owl Eyes Editor)
The short story “Yellow Wallpaper” is about a woman who writes in her diary and is also suffering from post-partum depression, the story is written in the form of diary entries. She first begins by describing the large, elaborate home that she and her husband, John, have rented for the summer. The woman’s husband John is a family physician, who is an extremely practical man. They rented this house solely for John’s wife to be exposed to clean fresh air and a calm environment so that she can recover from what he sees as a slight hysterical tendency. The woman is often writing in her dairy complaining that her husband will not listen to her worries about her condition and she feels like he is treating her like a child, when she is not writing in her diary she studies the house and she believes that there is something strange and mysterious about the house, but as usual her husband dismissed her concerns, stating that it is just her act of imagination. She secretly writes in her diary because she misses writing and conversation which she was banned from worrying that it will overwork her also for part of her career she is also banned from doing any other work besides domestic work
Save your time!
We can take care of your essay
- Proper editing and formatting
- Free revision, title page, and bibliography
- Flexible prices and money-back guarantee
They are sleeping in the room at the top of the house, which she believed was used as a nursery since it has barred windows and peeling yellow wallpaper. This yellow wallpaper becomes a major focus in the story, as she grows obsessed with trying to decipher its seemingly incomprehensible, illogical patterns She continues to hide her diary from John and grows more and more convinced that the wallpaper contains a malicious force that threatens the whole home. When she can escape the attention of her husband and Jennie, his sister, she continues her study of the wallpaper and begins to imagine that she can see a mysterious figure hiding behind the top pattern. As she grows more paranoid about the house, she tries to convince her husband that they should leave the house, but he insists that he is seeing progress in her treatment and says indulging her concerns could be dangerous for her treatment and it also teaches self-control. As time passes by, her depression, fatigue, and her fascination with the wallpaper worsens, in her diary she writes about her progress in uncovering the secrets of its pattern and concludes that the figure she sees in the pattern is a woman trapped behind bars. She makes it a mission of hers to free the lady, she hides all of this from her husband and his sister, and she starts to even to keep the secrets from her diary. At the climax of the story, her mental breakdown becomes complete and her insanity somehow makes her convince herself to believe that she is the woman being trapped behind the wallpaper when her husbands come to check her out and discover her creeping around the room and faints. The Araby and Yellow Wallpaper are both completely different short stories based on their themes. The Araby focuses more on love and sexuality while the yellow wallpaper focuses primarily on mental illness and how it's treated.
In the short story Araby One One of the central issues of “Araby” is the boy developing a crush on Mangan’s sister and the discovery of his sexuality. it shows the boy’s evolution by describing how he was brought up in a sheltered neighborhood, where there were only certain types of people who lived there, and then using physical descriptions of Mangan’s sister to highlight the boy’s budding sexuality. The young boy lives on a “blind” street, a dead end that is secluded and not frequented by outsiders, Additionally, he attends an all-boys school, which suggests that he does not know many girls and how to interact with them, that is why he couldn’t talk with his crush except the time where she approached him. Because of his lack of female knowledge he immediately falls for his friend’s somewhat older sister and thinks of his infatuation as a kind of worldliness that only solidifies the sense of his lack of experience with girls. We see the boy's growing sexuality is further captured in his detailed descriptions of Mangan’s sister’s physical form: “Her dress swung as she moved her body and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.” The author here captures the way that the boy is both physically seeing Mangan’s sister, and yet also how this way of seeing her is so new to him as to be almost innocent. He is not thinking of sex; he may not even know what sex is. But he is aware of and appreciative of her physicality in an essentially idealistic way. The boy is clearly infatuated with Mangan’s sister, we can see that it is not real love because he only physically thinks of her and there are no details about her personality, he has not spoken with her to get to know who she is. The boy’s relationship with Mangan’s sister is just a crush and his thinking that it is love just demonstrates how naïve and innocent he is. As he tries and fails to buy a meaningful gift for Mangan’s sister he also realized that what he thought is love is vanity, his love toward Mangan’s sister is not because he desires her physically and emotionally like a lover would, but what he desired was acknowledgment and acceptance from her, he then realized that whatever he feels for her, she might have felt the same, so he felt anguish and anger upon his realization.
Stuck on your essay?
