"A Rose for Emily" and "The Yellow Wallpaper"

In "A Rose for Emily", Emily is not crazy in the traditional sense of the word. Part of the reason Emily lives a secluded life is because her father turned away all of her potential husbands before he died. After her father's death she has no one to take care of her so she clung to the security of the past by resisting the changes of the younger generation. When Emily's love for Homer Baron is not returned, she does the only thing she can to keep him from leaving; she kills him and then tenderly loves him for the next forty years until she dies. The combination of being a Grierson who thinks she is better than everyone and her inability to let go of the past help to portray Emily as a crazy person when in reality she is desperately lonely and to stubborn to accept the new ways of the post Civil War society.
The narrator from "The Yellow Wallpaper" suffers a mental breakdown after she has been isolated in her room with her hallucinations for most of the summer. Her lack of stimulation and her active imagination propel her deeper into the madness of her own world until she finally breaks down and creeps along the mop-board of her room.