Whether you’ve come from a home without much love, understanding or support, or maybe you have or are suffering from an illness, we have all had experiences at some point in our life that have profound affects in where we’ve come from and in shaping who we are.

Take a look at Rose in ‘Royal Beatings’. Rose grows up poor in the back of a grocery/furniture repair store, experiences the loss of her own mother and is raised by her stepmother Flo and father. Before Flo assumed position of stepmother, she was witness to a beating of a man. Sadly, Flo goads Rose’s father to carry out punishments with beatings and threatens Rose with a ‘Royal Beating’ one day. Rose doesn’t know what a ‘royal beating’ is exactly and so conjures up in her mind what it could be. This is a life, whereby, I’m sure anybody would want to escape. Rose does so by withdrawing into a colorful and imaginative world within.
In ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, the author describes the yellow wallpaper as a revolting, smoldering unclean flamboyant pattern stripped in areas on the nursery walls of a temporary rented mansion while her permanent home is being renovated. The described walls alone tell the reader of how one may feel about their own life if this person is undergoing or being treated for temporary nervous depression. Her husband/physician assures her nothing is the matter and she simply just needs the “rest-cure” treatment.
Like any person can change in how they feel from day to night, the yellow wallpaper changes from daytime to nighttime too. By day, she tells us the walls have a lack of sequence and that they are a constant irritant, which she finds infuriating and torturous. By night, the outside pattern of the wallpaper reveals bars with a woman in the sub-pattern trying to climb through. The reader soon learns that this wallpaper is not simply just, but it is a disturbing writing of