Oppression of Women in Chopin's Story of an Hour and Gilman's Yellow Wallpaper
"The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin and "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman share the same view of the subordinate position of women in the late 1800's. Both stories demonstrate the devastating effects on the mind and body that result from an intelligent person living with and accepting the imposed will of another. This essay will attempt to make their themes apparent by examining a brief summery of their stories and relating them to their personal histories. It will reveal this theme further through analysis of setting, visual and conceptual symbolism, and by exploring the relationships between the characters in each story.
In the "Story of an Hour", we are told that Louise has a bad heart condition. A friend of the family has discovered that there was a bad accident at her husband?s job and he is on the deceased list. Louise?s sister carefully tells her this distressing news; however, instead of falling apart, Louise finds herself feeling as if she has a new lease on life because she will finally be able to live for herself. Suddenly, her husband walks in the door, and shocked, Louise drops dead of a heart attack. The physician says it was from "a joy that kills" (341-342).
In "The Yellow Wallpaper", the main character is attempting to heal from a nervous disorder. Her physician prescribes the "rest cure" which allows her to do nothing: no housekeeping, no writing, and no visiting with family or friends. She cannot even play with her baby. Her husband insists that she stay in a room upstairs and she eventually goes insane.
Both Chopin and Gilman borrow from real events in their lives when writing these stories. Kat...
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...V. Roberts and Henry E. Jacobs. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc. Simon Schuster/ A Viacom Company, 1998. 542-553.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "Why I Wrote ?The Yellow Wallpaper?" Ed. Catherine Lavender; The College of Staten Island of the City University of New York, Fall Semester, Oct. 1997. (25 Jan 1999) http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/whyyw.html
McChristie, Pat. "Women Need to Work" Copyright: 1998. Cyberwoman (30 Jan 1999) http://www.cyberparent.com/women/needwork.htm
Wyatt, Neal "Biography of Kate Chopin" English 384: Women Writers. Ed. Ann M. Woodlief Copyright: 1998, Virginia Commonwealth University. (26 Jan. 1999) http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng384/katebio.htm
"Why are Women Leaving Marriage in Droves?" Marriage. Copyright: 1998. Cyberwoman (30 Jan 1999) http://www.cyberparent.com/women/marriage1.htm
At the close of Crime and Punishment, Raskolinkov is convicted of Murder and sentenced to seven years in Siberian prison. Yet even before the character was conceived, Fyodor Dostoevsky had already convicted Raskolinkov in his mind (Frank, Dostoevsky 101). Crime and Punishment is the final chapter in Dostoevsky's journey toward understanding the forces that drive man to sin, suffering, and grace. Using ideas developed in Notes from Underground and episodes of his life recorded in Memoirs of the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky puts forth in Crime in Punishment a stern defense of natural law and an irrefutable volume of evidence condemning Raskolnikov's actions (Bloom, Notes 25).
Chopin Kate ‘’ the story of an hour’’ heritage of American literature Ed James E Millar vol2. Austin Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1991.487 print
Seyersted, Per, and Emily Toth, eds. A Kate Chopin Miscellany. Natchitoches: Northwestern State University Press, 1979.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. A Norton Critical Edition: Kate Chopin: The Awakening. Ed. Margo Culley. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994. 3-109.
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 and nurturers of the children. Only recently 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 is derived 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 plight near the turn of the 19th century. This era is especially interesting because it is a time in modern society when women were still treated as second class citizens. The two main characters in these stories show similarities, but they are also remarkably different in the ways they deal with their problems and life in general. These two characters will be examined to note the commonalities and differences. Although the two characters are similar in some ways, it will be shown that the woman in the “The Story of an Hour” is a stronger character based on the two important criteria of rationality and freedom.
An Analysis of Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a renowned feminist and author, was one of the women affected with "...a severe and continuous nervous breakdown tending to melancholia..," which was commonly termed as "neurasthenia" (Gilman, 348-349). However, rather than cure her, Mitchell's "rest cure" nearly drove her insane. As a result of her maddening experience away from writing and almost all intellectual thought, she wrote her short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper" not "...to drive people crazy," but instead to "...save people from being driven crazy" (Gilman, 349). Although her purpose in writing the story is clear, one can not help but wonder if she was motivated solely by her protest to nineteenth century medical practice or by her protest to the legal and socia...
The short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman perfectly portrays and embodies the suppression of late nineteenth-century married women in a male-dominated society which resulted in a whole class of people plagued by the severe mental ramifications of this defective structure. The plot greatly aligns with a personal experience the author (Gilman) had in which the constraint of her freedoms following the advice of her doctor drove her near the edge of madness, nearly making "The Yellow Wallpaper" a personal account of these events. During this period in the nineteenth-century women held very few legal rights and were actively expected to take on the role of homemaker and were often bombarded by oppressive gender stereotypes,
The writing of Kate Chopin shows elements of both Realism and Naturalism; Chopin’s characters are dynamic, the story is almost nearly always open ended, and there is a definite experience of the commonplace - textbook characteristics of Realism; however, these same characters are displayed with an underlying determinism and cover taboo topics - denoting a stronger sense of Naturalism (Scheidenhelm). Therefore, despite how it may appear at first, Kate Chopin is not an author of the Realism genre but instead is part of the Naturalism genre.
Often in works of fiction there exists a clear distinction between characters who are meant to be seen as good and those as evil. The hero saves the day by way of thwarting the villain's evil plan. However, in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment we are introduced to the characters of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov and Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladov who display acts of moral ambiguity and are neither fully hero nor villain. These character’s acts are not black and white, but fall in a gray area of uncertainty. They each show signs of villainy and heroism and their stories can be parallelled. In the final chapter of part five, the reader is given a summary of the overarching storyline via Katerina Ivanovna’s actions leading up to her death. This scene contributes to the argument of morality because it reiterates the uncertainty of the distinction between right and wrong of Raskolnikov's crime which run through the pages of this novel by showing a condensed recount of how the combination of the desire to help others and the inability to do so because of poverty have tainted both character’s moral actions.
Many women did not benefit from rest. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," Jane, the protagonist, is put on bed rest after giving birth to her baby. She is prescribed bed rest from her doctor and husband, John (6). John secludes her from family and friends by renting a rundown country home for the summer (6). She is to have total bed rest while at the country home. John said that Jane "was to have perfect rest" (Gilman, 14). As the summer progresses, Jane's condition becomes increasingly worse, and she begins to hallucinate. She thinks that she sees things moving on the yellow wallpaper in the room that she is staying in. Jane says, "The pattern does move-and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!" (23). The therapy causes Jane to retreat into madness (Kivo 6). Jane's madness becomes apparent when the woman behind the wall and Jane start to tear all the yellow wallpaper from the walls of the room (25). Jane's condition deteriorate...
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a literary exaggeration of Gilman’s personal battle with depression that exploits not only the flaws in the perception of depression in the late 1800s but the flaws in that society’s views on women as well. Set up in a diary format, the entry document a three month stay at a secluded mansion where the narrator’s physician husband John, who has told friends and relatives that there is “really nothing the matter with [his wife],” has brought her in on the sabbatical, of sorts, in hopes of treating her “nervous depression” (394, par.10). The diary format comes from the fact that the narrator is not openly allowed to write or “work” as part of her treatment. The ledger becomes her secret confidante and as well as a map of how her depression becomes a full blown psychosis. Having been instructed by her husband not to focus on her illness she sets her sights on the yellow “flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin” on the wallpaper of the converted attic/nursery that John has commandeered as their bedroom for the summer (395, par. 34). As the narrator forces herself into submission in the presents of her husband and his sister Jennie, her depression seem so transform into a state of paranoid hallucinations fueled by her obsession with the yellow wallpaper. Finally the inward turmoil manifest it’s self in a very outward way and erupts into full on madness with the narrator believing she is the woman that she has seen in the wallpaper trying to escape. Having noted the slow decline of the narrator from imaginative and independent to submissive and secretive strikes a personal cord with me, as I to have suffered with depression in my personal life. I plan to identify...
After he has committed the act, he feels guilty about how he was forced to murder another person he had not intended to kill. This is the first step that unravels the superior man theory, since he feels guilty for killing an “inferior” that he had not meant to harm. He starts to also be consumed by guilty as he reflects on the horror he had committed in the name of the principal of establishing his superiority. He is unable to shake off the guilt that is slowly consuming and destroying him, no matter how hard he works to convince himself that he was justified in ridding the world of two inferior beings. Due to the fact that he becomes ill and irrational, unable to think clearly that he was unable to take upon him the mantle of being a “superhuman”, proves that this theory is not a natural part of humankind and is despised by civilization. Humans are inherently good as seen in the scene where Raskolnikov gives money to a poor, drunk girl that had clearly been taken advantage of and was about to be taken advantage of again. This compassion can naturally; instinctually that Raskolnikov struggled with how he could do something charitable, when he was trying so hard to rise above such menial, moral laws. It is clear that the theory of the superior man is only a tool used to justify criminal action in failed attempts
The book Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky has a main ideology in which the novel is based on. The protagonist, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment embodies the idea of nihilism and the Übermensch. Dostoyevsky places the main character with the ideology that he wishes to shine light on. In this case, Dostoyevsky, hoping to criticize the philosophy of nihilism allows Raskolnikov to believe he is a kind of Übermensch, transcending society and making greater decisions and later renounce nihilism it to show its flaws.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening, and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin. New York: New American Library, 1976. Print