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Compare And Contrast The Yellow Wallpaper And A Jury Of Her Peers

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Comparing “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “A Jury of Her Peers” Many great authors have written stories about the oppression women faced in the past and one was Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of the late 19th century short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” She portrays the struggles and hardships that women of that period experienced through brilliant uses of theme, mood, tone, and imagery. Another equally great author that used imagery and events that happened in real life to describe the struggles women faced was Susan Glaspell. Her short story “A Jury of Her Peers” tells a story of a woman whose oppressive husband was murdered in his sleep while his wife slept beside him and Glaspell uses subtle imagery …show more content…

As the story progresses, it is clear of the narrator’s unstable mental condition which becomes apparent when she begins to see people within the wallpaper, “it’s like a woman stooping down and creeping behind the pattern” (Gilman 612). This could be a result of the narrator seeing herself within the wallpaper because she feels trapped and oppressed by her husband and marriage. This becomes more apparent when she says “the faint figure behind the wallpaper seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out” (Gilman 612). This disturbers the narrator into trying to talk to her husband about what is going on but he will not listen. He treats her like a child and patronizes her by calling her “little girl” and after she tells him how she feels and that she wants to leave he says “bless her little heart, she shall be as sick as she pleases” (Gilman 612). She gives up on trying to talk to her husband and returns to her room where she now sees a woman behind bars in the wallpaper, saying “the worst of all, by moonlight it becomes bars!” (Gilman 612). This further supports the idea that the woman symbolizes her oppression by her husband because she feels like she is trapped behind bars and cannot escape it. Throughout the story the narrator continually uses the word “creep” to describe an action. She first uses it to describe the woman behind the wallpaper who is “stooping down a

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