Compare and Contrast "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "No Name Woman"

"The Yellow Wallpaper" tells the story of a woman living in the nineteenth century who suffers from postpartum depression. The true meaning implicit in Charlotte's story goes beyond a simple psychological speculation. The story consists of a series of cleverly constructed short paragraphs, in which the author illustrates, through the unnamed protagonist's experiences, the possible outcome of women's acceptance of men's supposed intellectual superiority. The rigid social norms of the nineteenth century, characterized by oppression and discrimination against women, are supposedly among the causes of the protagonist's depression. However, it is her husband's tyrannical attitude what ultimately

The Story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a great expression of women’s oppression in the 19th century. The story introduces readers to a woman frustrating in her life and suffering from a nervous depression and her marriage as the yellow wallpaper is causing her a real insanity. Having a background about the timing and the setting that the story is written in helps the reader to internalize the whole meaning of the story and understand its important details. The story is told by a narrator using an anxious tone, and she is being angry and sarcastic at the same time. The woman mentions that her husband has taken her to a summer vacation. So, the story takes

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s essay “No Name Woman,” Kingston speculates the life of her deceased aunt from an anecdote her mother tells her. Kingston’s aunt is never discussed and is essentially dead to the family and village since she was impregnated by a man other than her husband. As a result, the village raided the family’s home, killed their livestock, and destroyed dinnerware to show Kingston’s aunt a fraction of the betrayal she had caused the town. Kingston’s version of the story retells her aunt being coerced to pursue a new man other than her husband that ends in an unplanned pregnancy. Killing herself, Kingston’s aunt tries to end the consistent bombardment of rejection and humiliation that her sins have caused her by jumping into the village well. To conclude, Kingston states she is haunted by her aunt’s ghost and the Chinese people fear being dragged into the well as a substitute.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator, already suffering with Post-Partum Depression, is further constrained when her husband John prescribes her resting treatment for her illness. John clarifies that she must lie in bed in the same, enclosed room, refrain from using her imagination and especially abstain from writing. This, in turn, forces the narrator deeper into her

Charlotte Perkins “The Yellow Wallpaper” gives the reader a profound look by using characterization at a wife who is attempting to overcome postpartum depression after the birth of her newborn. The woman thinks she is severely ill, but her physicians, (her brother and John her husband) describe the woman to have “a slight hysterical tendency” (Perkins 1). Her physicians think it is best to keep the new mother locked up in a room with yellow wallpaper and to have little to no interactions. The woman has no say in what she thinks is in her best interest to recover from her depression. The woman says “excitement and change would be good, but what do I know” (1).

Instructed to abandon her intellectual life and avoid stimulating company, she sinks into a still-deeper depression invisible to her husband, which is also her doctor, who believes he knows what is best for her. Alone in the yellow-wallpapered nursery of a rented house, she descends into madness. Everyday she keeps looking at the torn yellow wallpaper. While there, she is forbidden to write in her journal, as it indulges her imagination, which is not in accordance with her husband's wishes. Despite this, the narrator makes entries in the journal whenever she has the opportunity. Through these entries we learn of her obsession with the wallpaper in her bedroom. She is enthralled with it and studies the paper for hours. She thinks she sees a woman trapped behind the pattern in the paper. The story reaches its climax when her husband must force his way into the bedroom, only to find that his wife has pulled the paper off the wall and is crawling around the perimeter of the room.

feels cut in half as if her new American world were to pull her apart

The structure of the text, particularly evident in the author’s interactions with her husband, reveals the binary opposition between the façade of a middle-class woman living under the societal parameters of the Cult of Domesticity and the underlying suffering and dehumanization intrinsic to marriage and womanhood during the nineteenth century. While readers recognize the story for its troubling description of the way in which the yellow wallpaper morphs into a representation of the narrator’s insanity, the most interesting and telling component of the story lies apart from the wallpaper. “The Yellow Wallpaper” outwardly tells the story of a woman struggling with post-partum depression, but Charlotte Perkins Gilman snakes expressions of the true inequality faced within the daily lives of nineteenth century women throughout the story. Although the climax certainly surrounds the narrator’s overpowering obsession with the yellow wallpaper that covers the room to which her husband banished her for the summer, the moments that do not specifically concern the wallpaper or the narrator’s mania divulge a deeper and more powerful understanding of the torturous meaning of womanhood.

In “The Yellow wallpaper”, the wallpaper is a metaphor that expresses women’s protest against the repression of the society and their personal identity at the rise of feminism. During the Victorian era, women were kept down and kept in line by their married men and other men close to them. "The Yellow Wallpaper", written By Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a tale of a woman, her mental difficulties and her husband’s so called therapeutic treatment ‘rest cure’ of her misery during the late 1800s. The tale starts out in the summer with a young woman and her husband travelling for the healing powers of being out from writing, which only appears to aggravate her condition. His delusion gets Jane (protagonist), trapped in a room, shut up in a bed making her go psychotic. As the tale opens, she begins to imagine a woman inside ‘the yellow wallpaper’.

  "The Yellow Wallpaper," written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the late nineteenth century, explores the dark forbidding world of one woman's plunge into a severe post-partum depressive state. The story presents a theme of the search for self-identity. Through interacting with human beings and the environment, the protagonist creates for herself a life of her own.

Maxine Kingston, a famous writer whose work is often rooted in her experience as a first-generation Chinese American, wrote pieces that often shed light on how first generation Americans have figured out “how the invisible world the emigrants built around [their] childhoods fit in solid America” (para. 10). In her memoir The Woman Warrior, the first chapter “No Name Woman” involves a cautionary tale meant to discourage young Kingston from engaging in adultery and humiliating the family; the mother hopes the fear of being forgotten will serve as a deterrent for sexual lewdness. The chapter dramatizes the cultural differences between China and the United States, particularly the narrator’s internal conflict of identifying “what is Chinese tradition and what is the movies” (par.12). Through the mother’s initial tale and the narrator’s manifestation of her aunt’s life, Kingston creates some sort of dialogue between China and the United States. Moreover, Kingston employs the story of the dead aunt to navigate between the contrasting regions by highlighting the differences in traditions, customs, and the idea of femininity.

Kingston feels that there is a need for her to voice this out. Being an American Chinese, Kingston is not able to forget that this kind of thing could have happened. Since she is effectively forbidden from talking about it with anyone, therefore writing it down as a memoir and telling something which is supposed not to tell publicly, can be considered as Kingston's rebellion against the old Chinese customs and the traditions. And that is one of the reasons that she shows sympathy to her aunt since her aunt unintentionally broke a Chinese tradition which is what Kingston intended to do. Also, although the story is named as "No Name Woman", by writing down her aunt's story, Kingston has actually given this silence woman a voice.

She considers that “some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil.” (Kingston 6). Kingston writes her initial version of the “No Name Woman,” who was raped, raided, and died an outcast, but Kingston determines that this telling does not fit her understanding of China. Therefore, Kingston entertains another hypothetical, that her aunt took a lover and saved him from shame by giving “silent birth” and not revealing the lover’s identity (Kingston 11). Here, Kingston critically examines the inherited talk-story of her mother to determine the meaning she should obtain from the death of her aunt. Her mother’s conclusion is that she must not become pregnant, but Kingston is uncertain about the simplicity of her mother’s story. In the “No Name Woman,” Kingston introduces the fictitious memoir structure that she utilizes through the variety of interpretations of her aunt’s story. Consistently through the memoir, Kingston writes contrasting accounts of the same stories and imagines the stories of others to further her themes about silence, authenticity, and identity formation.

The Yellow Wallpaper, written by the famous Charlotte Perkins, is a captivating short story published in 1892 that presents the story from the perspective of the narrator. This story is quite fascinating and readers may easily view it from different perspectives. For example, some readers may interpret it as a medical critique while others may view it as feminist allegory. In this short story, Charlotte Gilman uses her personal experiences with pregnancy, especially the depression and anxiety that follows, to present a compelling anecdotal account which has far-reaching effects for ladies. At the point when the storyteller perceives that there is more than one caught, inching lady, Gilman demonstrates that the importance of her story develops past a segregated, singular situation. The author’s main persuasions for writing in this case, is to highlight the Victorian Era gender roles and to censure a particular medical treatment and the appalling standards in medicine as well as to discuss the sexual legislative issues which make the treatment acceptable in any way considered right.

Such statements lead to a certain shame about the past because of the violation of what the female role was supposed to wait for her husband, in which pregnancy is not an excuse for not fulfilling such expectation. In Chinese culture, stories keep young girls and daughters fearful, silent, and vulnerable about how an ideal woman should act; accordingly, the Chinese are frightened of “the downed one, whose sleeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute” (Kingston 239). Such concepts in Chinese culture lead to the happenings in the story by giving the “no name woman”; the idea that she no longer belonged to the family and that the community would never accept the fact of her pregnancy while her husband was gone for years would cause Kingston’s aunt feel shame and bring her life to an end of all the suffering caused by the community and their social expectations. The social expectations toward the female gender in the Chinese culture can cause individuals that do not follow such expectations to feel helpless causing them to embrace an atmosphere of silence, shame, and prejudice. Pregnancy was not an option for her culture, as many shamed her and lead the “no name woman” and her child to their own