Comparing Women´s Images in The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening

Women´s Images in The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening

The aim of this essay is analyse women´s images in The Yellow Wallpaper and in The Awakening, since the two readings have become the focus of feminist controversy.

Both stories were written by women, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin. But is this fact important to understand the aim of every story? Would they have had the same effect if the had been written by men? I will explore these matters.

I also considered it could be rather interesting to study and compare how heroines act, how they are constricted by patriarchy, how their husbands treat them, and if they triumph or not, in every story.

There is no doubt that the literary written by men and women is different. One source of difference is the sex. A woman is born a woman in the same sense as a man is born a man. Certainly one source of difference is biological, by virtue of which we are male and female. “A woman´s writing is always femenine” says Virginia Woolf

But we all know that Western societies have normally divided many human activities labelling some of them as masculine and others as feminine. So women are naturally femenine, and men are naturally masculine, and this fact should be reflected in their writings. I don´t agree with this assertion, a woman is naturally female, and by means of every culture, she is femenine. The same happens with men.

According to nature all human beings should write in the same way, but according to culture women are forced to write in a different way. And this difference “must be sought ( in Miller´s words) in the body of her writing and not the writing of her body” ( Showalter:252)

The two stories I am going to study were written by women. I think it is virtually imposible to tell, without previous knowledge, that these stories were written by female authors. Virginia Woolf says that “ the first words in which either a man or a woman is described are generally enough to determine the sex of the writer” . I don´t agree with this point, that is very difficult, and it must be also very difficult for specialists. But I must say that there are always something inherently different.

Women have a different way of viewing the world, because of the culture not the nature. They tend to write diaries, autobiographies, poetry…because the cultural context in which they write asks for that kind of literature .