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Both of the main characters in “Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Stetson are women in the 19th century. The main female character in “Story of an Hour” was told that her husband died, but when she found out that he was not, she died of a heart attack because of her heart condition. The main female character in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is being neglected by her husband, which makes her rethink their relationship, and eventually, go crazy. Carver and Stetson both use elaborate settings, similar protagonists, and use a theme of lost. However, the wife in The Yellow Wallpaper was grieving because her husband does not care for her, compared to Story of an Hour was grieving because of her husband's “death”. …show more content…
In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the setting is in a small room covered in yellow wallpaper. The yellow wallpaper represents a jail or imprisoned feel for the wife. It represents a jail feeling because it shows how much control the husband has over the wife. In “Story of an Hour” the setting in the home of the married couple. When she receives the news that her husband has died, she goes into a different room. When she returns, she is happy. This represents wanting to be free because the wife is happy she is free from her husband. The settings of both stories are quite similar, and so are the protagonists. The protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the Jane, the unhappy wife. She wants to get out of her marriage because her husband restricts her. In the “Story of an Hour”, the protagonist is also the wife. The wife in “Story of an Hour” also wants to escape her marriage. When she gets the news that her husband died, she feels “reborn”. When she finds out that he isn't actually dead however, she
Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were both highly influential realist and naturalist writers. Both authors wrote many pieces of literature which are focused around feminist themes and ideas of life and death. Two of these pieces are “The Yellow Wallpaper”, which is written by Gilman, and “Desiree’s Baby”, which is written by Chopin. Many factors have influenced these writers, such as stressors of their time periods, life experiences, and personal beliefs. Both of these short stories exhibit feminism due to life experiences as well as different viewpoints on death based on personal beliefs.
When we compare contrast the two stories "The Yellow Wallpaper" vs. "The Story of an Hour”. If we first look at the similarities that they have, they are both about women who are controlled by their husbands, and who desired freedom. But both women had different reasons for their freedom. It sounds as though both husbands had control over their lives and both women had an illness. But I don’t believe the husbands knew their wives were so miserable. So as we look at the lives of women back in the 19th century time they have the stereotypical trend of being a house wife, staying at home taking care of kids, the house, and aiding the husband in his work. Being in charge of the household makes women have many responsibilities to take care of but still women are often looked down upon and men who often thinks a women’s say is unimportant. The two short stories are about two women who have husbands that successful and the women who feel suffocated by their lack of ability to live their own lives or make their own decisions. The two stories present similar plots about two wives who have grown to feel imprisoned in their own marriages.
The two societies found in The Yellow Wallpaper and Othello are both patriarchal in nature; the stories themselves take up the issue of women’s oppression in each society. Patriarchy “is defined as the source of women’s oppression and gender inequalities in which men, as a group, dominate women as another group” (Johnson as cited in Ravari 155 ). Male superiority is demonstrated in the two texts in the way female characters serve and obey their husbands, and how the male characters patronize and cause detriment towards the female characters. Although there are similarities in the effects and consequences the women feel, the differences in culture, era and location of the two stories causes a discrepancy in the experiences of the women from
Women have traditionally been known as the less dominant sex. Through history women have fought for equal rights and freedom. They have been stereotyped as being housewives, and bearers of children. Only with the push of the Equal Rights Amendment have women had a strong hold on the workplace alongside men. Many interesting characters in literature are conceived from the tension women have faced with men. This tension comes from men, society, in general, and within a woman herself. Two interesting short stories, “The Yellow Wall-paper" and “The Story of an Hour," focus on a woman’s fix near the turn of the 19th century. This era is especially interesting
They are written during a time period when women were not viewed as important as men. The narrator from the yellow wallpaper is suffering from post-natal depression and has been recommended the rest of her cure by her husband and her brother, both physicians. Instead of curing her, it worsened her condition. The protagonist did try to convince her husband about what she would prefer, but she could not overcome the powerful authority figure. The narrator is restricted from working, writing, which leads to her obsession with the yellow wallpaper and suffocates her into madness.
Narrator and Point of View in The Yellow Wallpaper and The Story of an Hour
Both “The Story of an Hour” and Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” display women discovering freedom from society’s standards during the setting’s time period. In “The Story of an Hour,” Louise locks herself in her room after discovering that her husband has died and at that point in the story she finds herself more confident in herself. She exclaims, “Free! Body and soul free!” (Chopin 83). After she believed her husband died she finally had reason to take initiative in life and did not have to live a life were nothing was expected of her. She found freedom in locked quarters. Just as John’s wife did in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” As the wife’s sickness progressed, her anxiety over the yellow wallpaper increased. The patterns developed within the walls showed the image of a woman creeping along, and as the shadows of the bars from the window cast across the woman. This can symbolize how she is like the shadow, imprisoned in her room and mansion. As time moved forward, the wife fully identifies with the image in the wall, and by the end of the story she locks herself in her room and frees the woman behind the bars by pealing off most of the wallpaper.
The Story of an Hour, by Kate Chopin, and The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, both have very similar themes, imagery, and a plot with very little differences. In both stories the theme of the two short stories is the ideals of feminism. Some similar imagery is the idea of freedom and living on one 's own. The plots are very similar, both woman coming into conflict with their husband, feminism, and a tragic ending. Also, both deal with the everyday problems women faced during the periods surrounding the time the stories were written. Mrs. Mallard, from Story of an Hour, and Jane, from The Yellow Wallpaper, both are trying to write their own destinies but their husbands prevent them from doing so. Mrs. Mallard and Jane both
The main similarities, between these stories, are that they both have a narration of the story that is hard to fallow. The Yellow Wallpaper has a narrator that is a woman of sensitive temperament, and she is also a writer. The story is told in strict first-person narration, focusing exclusively on her own thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Everything that we learn or see in the story is though her consciousness, and since the narrator goes insane over the course of the story, her perception of reality is often completely at odds with that of the other characters. She is a young upper-middle-class woman who is suffering from what depression and whose illness gives her insight into her situation in society and in marriage, although even her, time in the hospital dose no goof for her and only robs her of her sanity. What we get most is the narrator is in a state of anxiety for much of the story, with flashes of sarcasm, anger, and desperation. So it is kind of hard to fallow. What’s happening until the end when the narrator, now completely identified with the woman
...Also in, "The Yellow Wallpaper", the narrator gets so loneley and so freaked out about what is happening in the wallpaper in her room that she actually goes insane. She tears everything down and she even bites it. She thinks that there are other people that have smudged the wallpaper when in reality it was her and now she is actually the trapped woman. This is how these two stories relate by the characteization of the authors by them both making their stories disturbing in different ways.
Comparatively, the relationships between the two main characters in the stories portray women’s yearning for freedom with different types of confinement. Psychological and physical confinements are terms that we can see used through out both stories. While “Story of an hour” basis its character being emotionally confined, and her great awakening being the room in which she grasps the hope of freedom. The settings show the character analyzes her new life, as her barrier and weight of being a wife is lifted, bring fourth new light. We can see in “The Yellow Wallpaper” that the author chose to base the main character John’s wife, around physical confinement in which her room symbolized imprisonment, and due to her illness mental confinement as well. Soon enough we see that her sickness takes hold making her believe she has desperately found freedom, but in reality she has found nothing merely more than herself. Something she had hated throughout the story, ending in only sadness. Telling us Psychological confinement played a big role as her sickness takes hold of her identity leaving behind the
In “The Yellow Wall-paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the unnamed female protagonist is going through a rough time in her life. (For now on, this paper will refer to this unnamed character as the “the narrator in ‘Wall-paper,’” short for “The Yellow Wall-paper. The narrator is confined to room to a room with strange wall-paper. This odd wall-paper seems to symbolize the complexity and confusion in her life. In “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, the protagonist, Mrs. Mallard must also deal with conflict as she must deal with the death of her spouse. At first there is grief, but then there is the recognition that she will be free. The institute of marriage ties the two heroines of these two short stories together. Like typical young women of the late 19th century, they were married, and during the course of their lives, they were expected to stay married. Unlike today where divorce is commonplace, marriage was a very holy bond and divorce was taboo. This tight bond of marriage caused tension in these two characters.
An Analysis of Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
Depression is an illness oftentimes misunderstood by the individual and their family. One symptom of depression is isolation and in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Doris Lessing’s short story, “To Room Nineteen,” the protagonists feel trapped and unfulfilled in their ordinary lives causing them to become depressed. The battle both these characters undergo reveal many compelling similarities, despite the origin and breaking points of their disturbing thoughts and actions. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “To Room Nineteen,” the two protagonists experience isolation from the world and people around them.
In the short story, the Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator chooses to write about a married woman in a new home who ultimately falls down into a spiral of insanity. The Yellow Wallpaper centers primarily on the narrator and her discovery in the room she must stay in to rest. There she sees a yellow wallpaper that soon begins to take the form of a woman who is trapped, and is shaking the wallpaper in order to get out. The narrator continues trying to figure out the wallpaper and its pattern until eventually deciding to rip the wallpaper off in an attempt to free the creeping woman trapped inside. Thus, the narrator in the Yellow Wallpaper suffers a mental collapse by going insane in her attempt to understand the wallpaper which can be attributed