Barashka
ENG 1120
Comparative Analysis of the Women - Characters in the Stories "Lullaby" by Leslie Marmon Silko and "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Leslie Marmon Silko and Charlotte Perkins Gilman do not have the same national and cultural background, they lived in different periods of the American history and raised different problems in their works, but still they have something in common. They are both women and they cannot avoid writing about women and their fate.
In the short stories "Lullaby" by Leslie Silko and "The Yellow Wall-Paper" by Charlotte Gilman the main characters are women. These two women belong to different social groups and nationalities. At first sight an awfully poor Navajo woman Ayah who is living in a small boxcar shack on a ranch (in "Lullaby") and a comparatively well-to-do white woman living in a colonial mansion (in "The Yellow Wall-Paper") have nothing in common. But on the other hand they are both suffering. The cause of their suffering is different; the intensity is almost the same.
Ayah`s suffering is connected with the death of her elder son Jimmie and the loss of her two children Danny and Ella who were taken from her against her will. She hated her husband because he had taught her to sign her name. Being frightened by the way the white people looked at her children, "like the lizard watches the fly" (Silko 2545), Ayah signed the papers she could not understand at all.
The story begins with Ayah in the later years of her life. She is an old woman now and all her life has become memories. She is waiting for her husband sitting by a creek and starts to reflect on her past and her kids. The story is full of flashbacks describing the times when her children were living with her and even the time when she herself was a little girl and her mother worked at the loom. All the reminiscences are connected with each other and give us a full picture of Ayah and her life. She...
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