The Instituition of Marriage

While the women are struggling with the oppression from, society and their husbands, they also have to face internal struggles. The woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” struggles with writing in secret, and being trapped in the room. Overtime, she becomes more insane and spends her time trying to find ways to help the woman she sees in the wallpaper escape. The woman from “The Story of an Hour” didn’t struggle internally until the very end. She had just left the room she had locked herself in, when he husband walked through the door alive and well. When she saw him all of her hopes and dreams she had just spent the past hour on were ripped out from underneath her.

The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman written in the 1890s both reflect gender roles of this time, specifically women’s roles. In these stories both of the women are oppressed by their marriages, and by the end of the stories both wish to be rid of their husbands. Also, in both of these stories these women experience mental illnesses, mainly depression. These illnesses were looked at as something minor during this time, was it because psychologists were uneducated, or because as women their mental stability did not really matter? These stories connect so well because of their work to bring to the surface the reality of gender roles in the 1800s. Even though these stories were fictional their ideas were very real. By comparing how men and women were treated during this time, and how they are treated more equally now, it shows that with time American has come a long way.

In The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins describes the story of a woman suffering from a mental illness during the 19th century. The protagonist (an unknown narrator) is a wife and mother suffering from postpartum depression. Her husband John, who is also her doctor, diagnosed her with hysteria and he decided to move away with her to start a “rest cure,” at a mansion, isolated from the village. The narrator was powerless against her husband, and he had the authority of determining what she does, who she sees, and where she goes while she recovers from her illness. Throughout the story, the author used stylistic elements, such as strong symbolism, to show how the mental state of the narrator slowly deteriorates and ends

Women in history stood best known for a less ascendant sex in the mid-nineteen centuries. Since times have gone by women had fought for their equal rights and freedom. There had been many stereotypes, where the women were considered as a slave to the men’s because the women’s position was to be the homemakers and a mother to their children, while the men’s are out socializing with others. If they were not happy with the marriage, they cannot just walk out or complain because a women role is to endure all these pains without a word coming out of their mouths. Two out of the ordinary short stories, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Story of An Hour,” mostly focused on a women’s dilemma that they faced near the 19th century. The two main characters in the short stories show some resemblances in some ways, but both characters portrayed them in different ways of how they dealt their sorrows in their marriages.

The wallpaper is "repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight" (132). To add to the grotesqueness of the color, the paper was unkept and peeled "in great patches all around the head of [her] bed" (131). It had a pattern that was a flamboyant and through the progression of the story, the protagonist starts to see a woman that seems to be trapped behind

The symbolism of multiple aspects of “The Yellow Wallpaper” help to make the reader understand the subordination of women and the heinousness of such subordination. Moonlight is the first symbolism one can see the prominence of. The moon has long been a symbol of the woman as with early

In the novels written by Charlotte Gilman and Kate Chopin, the concept of marriage is contradicted from the romanticized relationship to a notion of imprisonment. Through the feminist perspective the reader gains a sense in which marriage may be the primary cause to gender oppression. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” Gilman’s central figure, who is unknown to the reader, is metaphorically imprisoned in a house in which the warden is her own husband. In contrast to this Chopin’s Character, Louise Mallard, gains a sense of liberation from a bleak marriage. It is clear that there two works illustrate how the characters are imprisoned through marriage. In both works there is a fine-line between the concept of domesticity and masculinity that ties

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

In “The Story of an Hour”, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and “Trifles”, the authors all question the institution of marriage through the emerging theme of the oppression of women. In each of these works, women are shown trapped in confining marriages. While marriage is supposed to be seen as one of the most beautiful and perfect sanctities life has to offer, these authors portray it as more of a bittersweet agony that women are forced to endure. Chopin, Gilman, and Glaspell use a combination of symbolism and perspective in their literature to bring about this theme of female oppression. With this theme, the authors cause the readers to take a more feminist perspective and question the institution of marriage through the eye of the average housewife of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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’.

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the protagonist symbolizes the effect of the oppression of women in society in the Nineteenth Century. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the author reveals the narrator is torn between hate and love, but emotion is difficult to determine. The effects are produced by the use of complex themes used in the story, which assisted her oppression and reflected on her self-expression.

The unnamed narrator written in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, is characterized as a demure, and obedient woman that heeds to her husband’s commands, all the while desiring the ability express herself. The narrator is married to a physician named John.

In the stories “The Jewelry” by Guy de Maupassant, “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the female characters are unequal and less important than the men in society. The duties of women during this time period did not consist of much more than seeing to her husband’s needs and caring for the home and children. The authors show the lack of independence women were allowed in the 1800s, especially in marriage. The stories express women’s cry for equality and their feelings of entrapment in their marriage. Each story elaborates on the importance of social class in the 19th century, how women were presented in society, and how society

As a convention, marriage for women has been a landmark of success. It is necessary for a woman to enter into marriage to be recognized by the society as successful. The requisites of marriage such as love and affection are often neglected in exchange for some financial value imposed by the husband. In The Story of an Hour it is exemplified in ?a heart trouble? of Mrs. Mallard while in The Girls in Their Summer Dresses points out to Frances? longing to keep her husband in spite of her doubtful interest upon her.