Meagan Barber
300096012
English 120
Dr. Dhawan
February 14, 2015
Analytic Response Paper
The main characters in “A&P” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” exhibit traits that make them distinctive of one another in the way they struggle against rules, authority figures, and inflexible social systems. In “A&P”, Sammy shows how embarrassing it is to confront customers in public when they disobey company policy whereas “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a feminist text that outlines and shares a story about one nameless woman’s struggles against the male-centric and societal “norms” in America.
Sammy is a cashier that works at a local A&P supermarket and he struggles with the rules of the supermarket that deal with a specific dress code. Three women walk…show more content… In the story, the marriage reinforces the direct distinction between the domestic functions of the female and the active work of the male. John, the husband believes that he has superior wisdom and judgment to that of what his wife possesses. These ideas lead him to suppress and misjudge his own wife and he dominates her because he believes that he is helping her. During this time, this was the expected social system that placed greater importance on the men in society. The only way this woman stayed even remotely happy was to exercise the power of her mind and retreat herself into an obsessive fantasy. The mental restraints that are placed on her by John are what drive her to be insane and she is forced to hide any anxieties or disorders. John places rules upon the women in the way that he says writing is especially off limits for her and he warns her that she needs to use her self-control to combat her urges. By the end of the story, the women’s eventual insanity emphasizes that she was unable to break out of the confines of the male dictated societal expectations. Her husband acted as an authoritative figure who was “above her” in the decision making processes. “I don’t like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. I wonder if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did?” This quote explains the story’s final scene and how the unnamed woman was able to see and feel freedom, as she was ripping down her yellow wallpaper. The woman that she imagined she could be in her mind began to mesh with her