What are some similarities and differences between "Araby" by James Joyce and "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman?

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and "The Yellow Wallpaper" are similar in being first-person narratives in which a
narrator is trapped in a situation from which or he/she would like to escape from but
cannot.

The unnamed boy narrator of "Araby" is increasingly
oppressed by his "brown" and dull life on his "blind" (dead end or
cul-de-sac) alley in Dublin. He dreams of a better, more exotic life. He pins his dreams on
Mangan's sister, on whom he has a crush. When she expresses regret that she can't go to the
bazaar called Araby that is coming to Dublin, the boy wishes to go and buy her a gift there.
Araby and the girl merge in his mind as a fantasy of escape to a higher, more poetic realman
escape that he realizes at the end of the story will not occur.

Likewise, the
narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" wishes to escape from entrapment in the room where
her husband, a doctor, is keeping her so she can "rest" and recover from a nervous
disorder. Although she tries to tell her husband this is the worst possible cureshe needs
activityhe refuses to listen. She feels trapped and oppressed by the yellow wallpaper just as
the boy feels trapped by Dublin.

A main difference is that in the end the boy
has an epiphany or moment of insight in which he realizes fully that his fantasies about the
bazaar and the girl are futilenot a real means of escape. But while he faces the anguish of
awareness, the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" increasingly falls away from
awareness and into a psychosis that erodes her grip with reality.

In brief,
the boy moves toward awareness while the woman moves toward a break with reality. Further,
"Araby" is about the oppressive effects of ethnicity (being Irish) and a lack of money
while "The Yellow Wallpaper" is about the oppressive effects of
patriarchy.