The Yellow Wallpaper Women

702 Words2 Pages

During the late eighteen hundreds, according to society, women were not allowed to have their own identities. Their thoughts and opinions were irrelevant. Women were far from being an equal to their spouse. Married women with children had a role to play and were not expected to deviate from that role, unless they were mentally incapable. Society instilled what was to be expected, therefore women should know their position in a marriage.
Both women from The Awakening and The Yellow Wallpaper were frustrated with the path their lives had taken. Their husbands treated them like a child. Maybe this is due to the fact that they were not performing as an adult. In The Yellow Wallpaper, John loves his wife and wants the best for her. Even though …show more content…

Her identity of a wife and mother is stifled through the work of her husband and sister in law. Both John and his sister Jennie, do not want her to think about her condition, however that is the only thing she is able to think about. She had given birth to her baby a short time before moving into the house with the yellow wallpaper. Perhaps she suffered from postpartum depression, however not much was known about this during these times. If she had gotten proper treatment for her depression, maybe she would have overcome her illness. Instead, she was essentially locked away in a room and told to rest. She strives to form her own identity that has been lost due to her illness. Ultimately the narrator loses her whole identity to the wallpaper. She transforms from the depression filled wife and mother to one of the women creeping behind the wallpaper. The narrator destroys the wallpaper in an effort to escape the hold her husband has over her. In the end she loses her identity along with her …show more content…

The social norm tells her that she should be a dutiful wife and mother. This is not what she wants. She yearns for happiness, not really knowing what happiness is or where to get is from. Her identity is lost. She was her father’s daughter, her husband’s wife and her children’s mother. There was no room for the true Edna Pontellier to shine through. She may have been content with this situation until Robert Lebrun won her heart. He made Edna want to be her own person. She realized she had passions outside the walls of her family, however she felt as if these passions had came too late. She was torn between the life she was used to and the life she longed to live. This confusion ultimately leads to her

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