Identical twins have the same genes that make both of them look, think, and feel the same. Their likes and dislikes are the same; for instance, when one likes yellow, another will like yellow. However, their fortunes are different; for instance, when one dies, another would not die. Similarly, in literature, different authors create a twin character in different eras. It is as if a second twin sister is born forty years after the first one was born. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman ( 1892) and "The Chrysanthemums," written by John Steinbeck (1938), both stories are similar in characterization and setting. They differ, however, in narrator's point of view and the symbolism. Each actual symbol is different, but its meaning is the same. Being trapped inside a house and having a limited life under a husband's control lead to a miserable ending of a woman's life.
             While Gilman use a lonely, big house where his main character stays for three months, Steinbeck sets a small farmhouse where Elisa lives and works. This definitely addresses their loneliness and isolation. Elisa works in her flower garden in which she plants chrysanthemums bigger than anyone does in the Salinas Valley. She works alone in her small garden that is surrounded with a "wire fence" to protect from "cattle and dogs and chickens" (Steinbeck 503). She lives in a small farmhouse that is away from other houses that make her feel as if she is isolated from her society. Steinbeck sets the Salinas Valley as it is also isolated from the rest of the world as Steinbeck states in the introduction: "[the] high grey-flannel fog of winter [closes] off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from the rest of the world [...] and [makes] of the great valley a closed pot" (502).
             On the other hand, Gilman uses a big, beautiful house as a setting. Her character is trapped inside the "h...