Can You Paint With All the Colors of Literary Movements?

Both The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Yellow Wallpaper by
Charlotte Perkins Gilman incorporate the theme of isolation through the lives of the
characters. The two literary works originated from extremely different movements in
literary history. The Scarlet Letter was written during a movement known as Dark
Romanticism, which was a period in which readers became interested in the
interworkings of the human mind. People wanted to know the reasons why a character
executed a certain action instead of how they did so. On the other hand, The Yellow
Wallpaper was written during a movement entitled Realism. Realism was when authors
decided that they did not want to read stories of fantasy; they wanted to hear about people
in their situation. Both stories used the theme of isolation to portray the characters, along
with the characteristics of the literary movement.
Isolation is a primary theme emphasized through the progression of The Yellow
Wallpaper. The protagonist, a woman who is not named, has been brought by her
husband to an old abandoned house, which the reader can interpret to have been a
childrens mental asylum. Once there, her husband, who also holds the role of her doctor,
forces her into a small room with a scare amount of windows, and the windows that the
room does have has bars on them. John, the narrators husband, feels that, no one but
[herself] can help [her] out of [her depression], that [she] must use [her] will and selfcontrol, (Gilman 5). He thinks she must be locked away by herself without work or
writing; all she should do is sleep. The main problem with his plan is that the narrators
central way of venting is through diaries, there comes John, and I must put this away,-he hates to have me write a word, (Gilman 2). She slowly begins to go insane when she

starts to see a woman trapped in the wallpaper, which the reader can infer to be a
reference to the protagonist's imprisonment inside her head, quarantined from the rest of
society. Therefore, isolation, as it relates to the story, inevitably leads to the insanity of
the narrator.
The Scarlet Letter is largely based on the theme of isolation, mentally and
physically. The physical representation of the theme is through the alienation of the
protagonist by the scarlet letter A, which she was forced to wear on her breast as a
representation of the crime she had committed, adultery. Another manner in which the
narrator felt isolated was by the location of her housing. When she chose a house to live
in with her young child, Pearl, she chose a, small abandoned cottage. It had been built
by an earlier settler, and abandoned, because the soil about it was too sterile for
cultivation, (Hawthorne 68). The house was on the outskirts of town that was, within
the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any other habitation Its
comparative remoteness put it out of the sphere of that social activity while already
marked the habits of the emigrants, (Hawthorne 68). She had socially, as well as
physically, isolated herself from the rest of the townspeople. Along with the ways she
secluded herself, the citizens of the town had their ways of making Hester Prynne, the
main character, feel degraded. They made her feel like an outcast in society through,
every gesture, every word and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact
[which], implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she
inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and
senses than the rest of human kind, (Hawthorne 71). After years of social isolation,
Hester begins to be looked upon, such helpfulness was found in her, -- so much power to

do, and power to synthesize, -- that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its
original signification. They said that it meant Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a
womans strength, (Hawthorne 134). The reader can see how the townspeople begin to
respect Hester, and the reader is lead to believe she has accepted her place, and work
around the social handicap she had acquired. Unlike The Yellow Wallpaper, Hester was
able to work with her preordained isolation, but the narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper
was driven insane due to the effects of isolation.
While the plot of the two stories may look like the most important portion, their
foundations, the literary movements they were written in, reign supreme. Even though the
stories themselves have overwhelmingly different plots, the movements shown inside the
stories are essentially quite similar. Dark Romanticism focuses primarily on the thoughts
behind all actions, and Realism focuses on people in their daily lives as they relate to the
people of the same period. Both, the Scarlet Letter and The Yellow Wallpaper, show
the daily lives of the main character. The author displays the normal routine of both
characters, in correlation to how they function in their daily struggles. Another
foundational relation both stories share is the ability to look into the brain of a certain
character and understand what they are thinking. In The Yellow Wallpaper, this
happens by way of the narrators journal. In the Scarlet Letter, the narrator tells the reader
how the said character feels about a situation. Literary movements play the most
important role in the groundwork of how a story is portrayed and written.
The theme isolation, found in The Yellow Wallpaper and the Scarlet Letter, can
also be related to the literary movements in which the author wrote them. The movements
themselves, Dark Romanticism and Realism, were able to shape the characters, settings,

and plots to fit the period in which they were made to have an effect. The readers in each
period could have read the story, and found its relation to their lives. Not only did authors
in the past attempt to relate to the reader, but the same ideals still live on today in modern
literary genres. Authors, even now, find it their literary responsibility to make the reader
feel as if they found a characteristic of themselves in a character.