I chose this image to represent A Rose for Emily because I feel that it symbolizes the deeper Freudian meaning behind the story. The skeleton hand represents Emily’s decision to murder Homer; it represents his death and the events that lead to it. The rose is a symbol of Emily, but it is also traditionally a symbol of purity, something Emily appears to have to her community. The skeleton taints the rose’s purity, just as Emily’s actions, which stem from her repression, taint her reputation as pure. The rose is also held by the hand and it appears to be trapped; just as Emily is trapped by her wishful impulses to kill Homer, she does it and towards the end it becomes her demise.

 

This image represents The Yellow Wallpaper because it depicts a woman trapped in a room. The room is also literally yellow, but I chose this image because I find it interesting how there is an open door and a window. I think that this represents the narrator’s headspace in the story. While she feels as if she is trapped in the room, she actually isn’t; she could have left the room at any time, but her hysteria makes her feel stuck. Just as the woman in the image has the opportunity to leave but she does not see it, the narrator has the opporunity to heal and get over her repression, she doesn’t because she is not given the neccesary help.

 

For my third annotation to a literary text, I decided to use a song. “Paradise” by Coldplay is about a girl who wants a different life, and is constantly upset by the life she has and everyone else. It talks about how she closes her eyes at night and dreams of a better life. This song made me think of Pecola from The Bluest Eye. Pecola has her own unsatisfying reality that she deals with, and she dreams (day-dreams) of having the blue eyes that would make her more accepted by society. This would be her paradise. The first line of the song is “when she was a girl, she expected the world”, and I think this fits Pecola because as a young girl, she didn’t know she was going to be put in the unfortunate situations she had been because of her race, she is very naive.