Compare the use of houses as psychological metaphors in "Araby" and "The Yellow Wallpaper." One possible question to consider is how the houses carry...

Both houses
in "" and "The Yellow Wallpaper"
are psychological metaphors for entrapment
and lack of possibility.

In "Araby," the houses on the unnamed
narrator's block represent the
boy's entrapment in the stagnant culture of Dublin. The street he
lives on is
described as "blind," meaning it ends in a cul-de-sac or a dead end. There

are almost no ways out. The houses on the block are brown, a symbol of Ireland's
perceived
dullness and lack of color or possibility.

His
own house carries grim
reminders of the past. A now-dead priest once lived in
it, and the air in it is "hung"
with a "musty" odor. He finds old books in
the house and "useless"
newspapers. It is stagnant, trapped in the past, just
as the narrator believes that Ireland
is.

In "The Yellow
Wallpaper," the patterned yellow wallpaper that
covers the walls of the room
in which the unnamed narrator lives comes to represent both her
entrapment
and her deteriorating mental health as she is put into a place of isolation
with
nothing to do.

Like the home in "Araby," the house
looks back to an
oppressive past rather than forward to the future. It is
"ancestral," a "colonial
mansion," "hereditary," and "haunted." Everything
about it symbolizes
the patriarchy that stifles the narrator, from which she
feels helpless to escape. The
greenhouses on the estate, symbols of growth,
are described as broken. The windows of the room
she is consigned to have
bars on the windows, another symbol of the entrapment.

She
describes the yellow wallpaper as the "worse" pattern ever and says of

it:

It is dull enough to confuse the eye in
following,
pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and
when you follow the lame
uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly
commit suicideplunge off at outrageous
angles, destroy themselves in unheard
of contradictions.

As the story makes
clear, the "dull," "lame," and suicidal
wallpaper comes to represent the
narrator's own psyche and psychic disintegration.

In both
stories, houses are used both as metaphors for how the relics of the past

entrap people seeking light and life. In "Araby," Ireland is the trap for the

narrator, and in "The Yellow Wallpaper" it is patriarchy. In "Araby"

entrapment leads to anguish and humiliation while in Gilman's story it leads
to
psychosis.