Compare and Contrast “Sonny’s Blues” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”
A lot of stories in literature is about coming to terms with or dealing with the interior world as it places out in the outer world. It has been mused that every person is a world onto himself or herself, and sometimes the rich inner life within the self is in direction competition with the world around them. This concept plays out in two very different stories in unique ways. James Baldwin’s story, “Sonny’s Blues” explores this world of communication of the self to the world through music and drugs and presents image of jazz culture in New York after the Second World War. Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her story “The Yellow Wallpaper” offers insight into the conflict of the feminine inner world amid oppression of a male patriarchy. By comparing and contrasting these two different stories, we can see that despite their unique themes, they share a common thread of the discord that can occur within the self in the face of the world. Baldwin’s story lends itself to an African American and ethnic reading, while Gilman’s story, because some of the issues her protagonist endures are similar to those that she underwent during her lifetime, lends itself to a biographical criticism.
Baldwin was active at the middle of the twentieth century, while Gilman was active towards the end of the pervious century and the beginning of the twentieth. They both lived in world’s that were rapidly changing, shedding old ways of being in exchange for new, while trying to establish and identity as an individual amid so much flux.
Baldwin’s story is told from the point of a narrator who is the brother of the story and as a result attached to the story. The Yellow Wallpaper is told using a first person narrator who is also the protagonist of the story. They both have in common the narrator’s being apart of the story and as a result are more liable to spin their narration to their own personal biases and assessments of the situations they encounter throughout the story.
In the introduction to Gilman’s autobiography by Ann. J. Lane, the writer remarks that, “Charlotte Perkins Gilman seems not to have been aware of any of her predecessors” (Lane, xi). Gilman is lumped in with the feminist writers and thinkers of her day, yet she was rigidly independent, and a loner. So while she was advocating and writing in promotion of women’s rights and themes, only post hoc did she become part of that tradition. This independence emerges in her protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” John’s wife, the narrator, despite being married, is very much alone. Her husband seems more like a formality than a partner, and he is never ever able to access her rich mental life inside. “John laughs at me,” the speaker says,”of course, but one expects that in a marriage.” Many women today would say that one should not expect that in a marriage. But the narrator, as a product of her time, is programmed to assume that a marriage is a certain way and as a result is trapped to do anything to modify it.
She mentions a temporary nervous depression and has been prescribed phosphates from her brother who is a physician. It is clear that the problems that these drugs are meant to solve are not so simple that covering them up with drugs and tonics is going to solve them. The speaker does not believe in their diagnosis and says, “Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change would do me good. But what is one to do?” (Gilman, 1).
That question is important, but to the speaker it is meant rhetorically, to mean, there is nothing that anyone can do, things are hopeless and I am trapped in this life. It is no wonder then that she is depressed and suffering from a nervous anxiety, she is alone. This mirror issues that Gilman the author underwent in her own life. Many of her personal dairy entries deal with her frequent fights with depression. Alone with her depression, Gilman was frustrated by the world that she saw around her much like her character in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is frustrated by her present circumstances. She was quoted saying, ““There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver.” (Gilman, 33).
Baldwin, in “Sonny’s Blues” is dealing with much different issues of race and drugs. The speaker and his brother Sonny grew up during a time when black in Harlem had few escapes from the reality of their less than equal shake at life. Some of them escaped through music of jazz, which as a musical form emerged from the black culture of the Harlem. Some of them escape their plight through music. And some, like Sonny, attempted to escape it through both. Patricia Hill Collins in her book “Black Sexual Politics” discusses the many changes in rights that were happening at the middle of the twentieth century. Blacks, she concludes, were more marginalized by women, since their fight was isolated from the dominant culture of white males, whereas women were able to take the battle to their homes, so to speak. (Collins, 10). She compares the issue to cancer saying that, “Deeming race to be more important than gender or class as more valid than sexuality can compromise the social justice core of a progressive black sexual politics.” In essence, to be black and a woman was to be specifically marginalized, fitting in both categories of marginalized people.
Though the narratives of both stories are markedly different, there is a common thread of philosophical thought that can be followed from one narrative to the next. Sonny is a heroine addict. It seems that like the Gillman’s protagonist, Sonny is also trying to escape a depression in the face of life. The speaker, who is a teacher, describes his black students as “filled with rage” and privy to only two darknesses, the one of their lives and the one they experienced through movies. Though many may have had dreams, all of them had uphill battles when compared with their white counterparts, the speaker muses that, “These boys, now, were living as we’d been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities” (Baldwin, 1).
In both stories there is openness to there being an utter darkness to human life that we never fully overcome. It is something we cover up with occupation, hard work, phosphates, music, and heroine. The brothers father described what they both feel, that the world has a harsh edge to it and no matter how you try to escape it, it will emerge. The speaker recalls his father saying to his mother during a conversation about finding a safe neighborhood for their children, “Safe, hell! Aint’ no place safe for kids, nor nobody.”
Sonny, after his release from prison, seems at piece with the realization that the world is tainted and filled with suffering. He says, “No, there's no way not to suffer. But you try all kinds of ways to keep from drowning in it, to keep on top of it, and to make it seem-well, like you. Like you did something, all right, and now you're suffering for it. You know?” (Baldwin, 21).
In Baldwin’s story, the story begins with Sonny’s low point and his precarious reemergence from it. But there is always the risk that he would turn back to drugs and sink back into the hole he us dragged him out of. “It can come again,” Sonny tells his brother in a ludic moment of resigned honesty.
For the speaker of the Yellow Wallpaper, there was no honesty in approaching her condition. She might have known the best solution for her issues, that she needed a more stimulating life and the freedom to not have to constantly worry about the whims of men, mostly her husband. But instead of listening to her, the men in her life, her husband and brother, decide that they know what is best for her and prescribe her drugs. This covers up her problems for a time, but leads her to a point of mania as she “creeps” around her house, obsessed with yellow wallpaper.
Baldwin’s story can be said to be a story about Sonny’s brother coming to terms that he can no longer claim to know his brother. That he inhabits a much different world than himself. Rather than doing what he has done his whole life, prescribing his own solutions to his brother’s problems, he begins to actually just listen to his brother and try to meet him on his own level. Seemingly, this is exactly what Sonny needs from his brother, not a lecture and criticism, but open acceptance. This is exactly what the narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” does not receive, and as a resolve it causes a split to form between her outer world and the reality of her inner, undealt-with, angst.
On why she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman in an magazine called the Forerunner, wrote that, “For many years I suffered from a sever and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia—and beyond.” She goes on to discuss whom the world at large, doctors and friends, all men, offered solutions to her problem that missed the point of her condition. These “cures” only made matters worse. She writes “using the remnants of intelligence that remain, and helped by a wise friend, I case the noted specialist’s advice to the winds and went to work again.” The work she returned to was the work of daily survival in a life that as Sonny muses is inevitably filled with suffering.
Not just these two stories, but also much of life deals with the issue of suffering, where it comes from and how to get out of it. “Sonny’s Blues” ends hopeful, that things might get better, while “The Yellow Wallpaper” ends with the narrator reaching the low point that Sonny’s story begins on.
Works Cited:
Collins, Patricia. Black sexual politics: African Americans, gender, and the new racism. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: an autobiography. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Print.
"Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin." Scribd. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Dec. 2013. <http://www.scribd.com/doc/7086554/Sonnys-Blues-by-James-Baldwin>.
"The Jazz Blues Motif In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" ." College Literature 3 (1984): 112. Print.
""Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper"." The Forerunner. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Dec. 2013. <http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/yellowwallpaper.pdf>.
