The Yellow Wallpaper and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin

The two novels “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Story of an Hour” contain many similarities between the two women characters. Both plots can be seen to have a wife whose husband’s affects to their medical situation turn them for the worst rather than better. Indications of mental disorder are very apparent throughout each story, starting innocent and building to the demise of the wife.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, we begin with a woman admiring her house that her husband has taken care of for their summer home. She suffers from nervous depression and complains that her husband, who also is a doctor, belittles her symptoms and her thoughts in general. She says that his rationalistic behavior is a compliment to her imaginative personality. She begins a secret journal in order to better cope with these feelings and concerns that she has. She talks about the room and how she hates the yellow wallpaper as it is odd, pattern less, and “revolting”. She complains of John’s patronizing ways but goes back to the wallpaper. John believes she is fixated on it and refuses to take it down in order to satisfy her neurotic fears. She thinks the bedroom was once a nursery and begins to see strange patterns in the main design of the wallpaper. She stops writing for she is interjected by Jennie, Johns sister, who’s been their housekeeper and nurse. Later john threatens to send her to a real physician whose care involves nervous breakdowns. She becomes obsessed with the wallpaper and identifying the pattern which appears to be a woman “stooping down creeping” behind the bars of a cage. When she tries to leave the house, John talks about her condition which stops her. The wallpaper begins to dominate her imagination, hiding her interest as so no one fi...

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...as a result of either two impulses; sexual or aggressive. “Aggressive was usually generated by death and through this it would become more likely that a person will choose to act upon it” (rpi.edu). We see the aggressive energy of living without her husband building in Louise as she copes with the death of her husband. One may ask why Gilman’s character is alive and Louise is dead. The fact that Gilman’s character snapped and went insane may look like she is physically alive but both characters in the end mental perished.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Story of an Hour” are great examples of how overprotection could cause you more pain then good. Although both stories indicate this principle at different ends of the spectrum, similarities can be seen in both stories to suggest that one’s sanity can be heavily altered through the behavior of another.