The Yellow Wallpaper
In the Yellow Wallpaper, this is the type of place where the narrator is staying during the story.
What is a rented country house (or summer estate)?
This is the main character of the story.
Who is Mrs. Mallard (Louise Mallard)?
This is the country where the essay is primarily set and criticized.
What is Ireland?
This is the small setting where the lottery takes place each year.
What is a village (or small town)?
This type of irony occurs when the outcome is the opposite of what is expected.
What is situational irony?
This is the narrator’s husband, who is also her physician.
Who Is John?
This is the reported event that supposedly causes Mr. Mallard’s death.
What is a train accident (or railroad disaster)?
Swift’s shocking “solution” suggests that poor children should be used for this purpose.
What is being sold as food (or eaten)?
This object holds the slips of paper used in the lottery drawing.
What is a black box?
This text critiques the oppression of women and lack of autonomy in marriage.
What is The Story of an Hour (or The Yellow Wallpaper)?
This “treatment” method, involving isolation and no mental stimulation, is prescribed to the narrator.
What is the rest cure?
This condition is why Mrs. Mallard’s sister breaks the news to her gently.
What is a heart condition?
This literary technique is heavily used throughout the essay to criticize society.
What is satire?
This character ultimately “wins” the lottery and becomes the victim.
Who is Tessie Hutchinson?
This character protests the fairness of a deadly tradition too late.
Who is Tessie Hutchinson?
The narrator becomes obsessed with this element in her room, believing a woman is trapped inside it.
What is the yellow wallpaper?
After initially grieving, Mrs. Mallard begins to feel this unexpected emotion as she sits alone.
What is freedom (or a sense of independence)?
Swift targets this wealthy group for exploiting the poor and contributing to Ireland’s suffering.
Who are the English (or wealthy landowners/upper class)?
This is the violent act that the villagers carry out at the end of the story.
What is stoning?
Across these texts, this shared theme reflects how society can harm individuals through control or conformity.
What is societal oppression (or control of individuals by society)?
By the end of the story, the narrator tears the wallpaper and begins doing this action around the room.
What is creeping (or crawling) around the room?
Doctors claim Mrs. Mallard dies from this ironic cause at the end of the story.
What is “the joy that kills”?
This is the deeper issue Swift is actually criticizing beneath his outrageous proposal.
What is the mistreatment and oppression of the poor (or economic inequality/social injustice)?
This is the central theme Jackson critiques through the ritual of the lottery.
What is blind adherence to tradition (or the danger of conformity/violence in society)?
This type of character, found in multiple texts, lacks a full name and represents broader societal roles.
What is a symbolic (or archetypal) character?