- Socioemotional Exchanges in “The Most Dangerous Game” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”
- On this page, we’re analyzing two short stories–“The Most Dangerous Game” and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Both contain examples of socioemotional exchanges–deals between individuals that occur within a socioemotional economy where people trade scarce emotional resources, including gratitude, sympathy, and respect.Characters in these stories exchange these valuable emotional commodities for each other, and these exchanges are colored by power imbalances between characters.
- Let’s start with “The Most Dangerous Game,” a story published by Richard Connell in 1924. The protagonist, Sanger Rainsford, is a world-class hunter, who falls off his boat and swims to a nearby island. On the island lives General Zaroff and his servant, Ivan. When Rainsford first approaches Ivan, he explains his predicament: “Don’t be alarmed… I fell off a yacht.” He feels he is owed sympathy but sees a “menacing look” in Ivan’s eyes. This is a classic example of a misgiving, when one party believes they are owed more of a particular emotion during an exchange. Rainsford doubles down, saying “I am hungry,” but Ivan’s expression only worsens.
- General Zaroff intervenes, however, and serves Rainsford dinner. He explains his backstory – he’s also a world-class hunter, and has become bored with hunting big game. On this island, he has created a cruel game where he hunts human beings for sport. Rainsford objects to this “game” and (rightly) calls it murder, expressing sympathy for the people being hunted and killed. Zaroff retorts, “I refuse to believe that so modern and civilized a young man as you seem to be harboring romantic ideas about the value of human life.” In other words, there is a gap between the amount of sympathy Rainsford and Zaroff allot to the hunted. Zaroff’s link to “civilization” indicates that in upper-class society, his lack of sympathy for the marginalized is a normative feeling rule, and Rainsford’s sympathy is deviant. He describes the hunted as “the scum of the earth” and lists many ethnicities as examples. Zaroff’s overt racism might not be shocking as an old man in the 1920s; it indicates lower sympathy margins for people of what he would describe as inferior races (interestingly, including whites).
- Rainsford responds with horror, forcing Zaroff to manage his resulting horror towards him: “a trace of anger was in the general’s black eyes,” but he responded calmly by describing the “good food and exercise” he allows visitors before he hunts them. He attempts to appear to Rainsford sympathetic to those he hunts: “I give [the hunted] his option, of course.” However, this so-called option is to get beat to death by Ivan, hardly a fair choice.
- The plot really thickens when Zaroff suddenly decides to hunt Rainsford. He expects Rainsford to be excited to evade him and his hounds: “You’ll find this game worth playing!” But Rainsford just stares. This is another misgiving, as Zaroff expects Rainsford to reciprocate his excitement. When he doesn’t, Zaroff gets annoyed.
- Soon, the hunt begins. Zaroff forces Rainsford into the forest with just a knife and a supply of food. If he survives three days, Zaroff will free him. The first day, Zaroff finds Rainsford but walks away on purpose. The second, Rainsford’s trap kills one of Zaroff’s hounds, to which Zaroff oddly responds, “Thank you for a most amusing evening.” This display of gratitude emphasizes the imbalanced nature of the relationship between Zaroff and Rainsford: while Zaroff thanks Rainsford for “amusement,” Rainsford would have thanked Zaroff for his life in response. Technically, the gratitude is reciprocal, but the type of gratitude offered by the two characters is so radically different that it hardly seems to be that way.
- On the third day of the hunt, Rainsford jumps into the sea and returns to Zaroff’s room. When he enters, Zaroff smiles and congratulates Rainsford on his success. He expects Rainsford to reciprocate this smile, but instead he threatens, “I am still a beast at bay.” This lack of reciprocation causes a misgiving that ultimately costs Zaroff his life, as Rainsford kills Zaroff in a duel afterwards.
“The Yellow Wall-Paper” is a short story detailing the journey of a woman told that she has a nervous depression by her physician husband who does what he thinks is best in taking care of her. The main issue of this short story is that the woman’s idea of what is best for her does not align with her husband John’s perception. John believes that what is best for his wife is for her to refrain from all cumbersome thinking, and likely preferable for him, most thinking in general. He restricts his wife from writing and brings her to an old mansion for her to take time for herself, regulating both her personal liberties and preventing others – except for a select few – from interacting with his wife while she is in this frail state. At this old mansion, the couple elect to stay in a room first deemed unbefitting them. The room is a former nursery and the walls are a sickly yellow and have cracks and lines all over them that are the central part of this woman’s fascination over this summer period that she stays here. It first appears derelict. But, over the summer this woman’s “depression” seems to progressively get worse to the reader while her husband’s impression of her is that her condition improves. Eventually, the short story leads to her husband discovering her modifications to the room (she ripped the wallpaper apart looking for a woman she saw behind the cracks) and coming to a realization that results in him passing out on the floor in front of her.
“In Candace Clark’s Misery and Company, she describes her concept of a socioemotional economy as “a system of give and take within which people negotiate many aspects of identity and social worth” (131). This economy dictates how much sympathy or effort people are willing to give to others based on the social context of specific relationships. She also discusses sympathy margins, her “term for accounts of ‘sympathy credits’ people create for each other to call on in times of trouble” (131). In “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” the socioemotional economy created between John’s wife, her brother, John, and John’s sister creates a dynamic that limits the sympathy margins that each character affords the other, namely the sympathy that the others give to John’s wife. Because her husband and her brother, both physicians, determined that she was not ill and just needed to rest to recover, she was never able to take the resources she truly needed and instead was forced to accommodate others methods which drove her down a worse path that eventually made clear her illness. Her brother and her husband demonstrate that they have limited sympathy margins for this woman because of their closeness to her. This proximity makes the two physicians believe that they know what is best because, in their minds, they know this woman as a healthy person. She herself notices this discrepancy saying, “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him” (649). Them thinking they know what is best restricts how much they listen to her and so they offer her less sympathy because they attribute her symptoms to strain on a mentally healthy person when that is not the case.
“Meanwhile, she sees John as a caring figure that, in her socioeconomic economy, gives a lot of time and effort to her and thus has a fair amount of sympathy credits stacked up. Due to his surplus of sympathy credits, she offers him much sympathy and gives him a lot of leeway even though she knows internally that what he’s doing may not be right. She believes that John’s accrued so many sympathy credits that she’s even willing to transfer fault from him onto herself as when she states, “I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and comfort, and here I am a comparative burden,” or when she excuses his lack of communication saying, “It is so hard to talk with John about my case because he is so wise, and because he loves me so” (649, 652).