Bartleby the Scrivener is the story of an aging Wall Street lawyer who must hire a third scrivener to deal with an increase in business. Bartleby, the scrivener hired toward this end, is at first extremely skilled and productive. He slowly retreats from work, though, using the phrase "I would prefer not to" as a stock refusal when entreated to perform a task. Bartleby drives the lawyer near to despair before finally being arrested for vagrancy and dying in prison of self-imposed starvation.
The Yellow Wallpaper is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman written as a set of first-person journal entries by a woman whose husband has locked her in the room to cure her of temporary depression. Over the course of the story, the woman becomes obsessed with the yellow paper, comes to believe she sees another woman trapped in the wallpaper and proceeds to rip it apart to free her. The story has been widely interpreted as a feminist critique of women's oppression and marginalization.