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Perspectives of the yellow wallpaper
The yellow wallpaper critical lens
Perspectives of the yellow wallpaper
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The setting of these two stories emphasize, on visually showing us how the main characters are based around trying to find freedom despite the physical, mental and emotional effects of living in confinement. While on the other hand, dealing with Psychology’s ugly present day behavior showing dystopia of societies views of women during the time period they lived. Comparatively, the relationships between the two main characters in the stories portray women’s yearning for freedom with different types of confinement. Psychological and physical confinements are terms that we can see used through out both stories. While “Story of an hour” basis its character being emotionally confined, and her great awakening being the room in which she grasps the hope of freedom. The settings show the character analyzes her new life, as her barrier and weight of being a wife is lifted, bring fourth new light. We can see in “The Yellow Wallpaper” that the author chose to base the main character John’s wife, around physical confinement in which her room symbolized imprisonment, and due to her illness mental confinement as well. Soon enough we see that her sickness takes hold making her believe she has desperately found freedom, but in reality she has found nothing merely more than herself. Something she had hated throughout the story, ending in only sadness. Telling us Psychological confinement played a big role as her sickness takes hold of her identity leaving behind the Alderman 2 woman she once knew. Both women only see the figure they imagine to be as the setting shows us this, in the end making them believe there is freedom through perseverance but ends in only despair. “The Story of an Hour” takes place in a single hour inside an A... ... middle of paper ... ...kness” hallucinations of madness. While the setting emphasizes searching for freedom despite the forms of confinement throughout the bittersweet stories, lets us view each characters life as it portrays the author’s time in which they lived, showing us there setting of life. Despite each characters will power giving them a hope of being liberated, somewhere along the lines of the story, we can conclude that freedom is just another metaphor of false hope. Works Cited Papke, Mary E. Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton. New York: Greenwood P, 1995. Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour”. The Seagull Reader: Stories. Ed. Joseph Kelly. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2001. 65 – 67. Gilman, Charlotte “The Yellow Wallpaper” ”. The Seagull Reader: Stories. Ed. Joseph Kelly. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 2001. 111-128.
So as we look at the lives of women back in the 19th century, they have the stereotypical trend of being a house wife, staying at home, taking care of kids, the house, and aiding the husband in his work. Being in charge of the household makes women have many responsibilities to take care of, but still women are often looked down upon and men who often think a women’s say is unimportant. The two short stories are about two women who have husbands that are successful and the women who feel suffocated by their lack of ability to live their own lives or make their own decisions. The two stories present similar plots about two wives who have grown to feel imprisoned in their own marriages. In the yellow wallpaper, she is virtually imprisoned in her bedroom, and does not even have a say in the location or decor of the room.
Under the orders of her husband, the narrator is moved to a house far from society in the country, where she is locked into an upstairs room. This environment serves not as an inspiration for mental health, but as an element of repression. The locked door and barred windows serve to physically restrain her: “the windows are barred for little children, and there are rings and things in the walls.” The narrator is affected not only by the physical restraints but also by being exposed to the room’s yellow wallpaper which is dreadful and fosters only negative creativity. “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study, and when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide – plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions.”
Papke, Mary E. Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1990.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, is a first-person narrative written in the style of a journal. It takes place during the nineteenth century and depicts the narrator’s time in a temporary home her husband has taken her to in hopes of providing a place to rest and recover from her “nervous depression”. Throughout the story, the narrator’s “nervous condition” worsens. She begins to obsess over the yellow wallpaper in her room to the point of insanity. She imagines a woman trapped within the patterns of the paper and spends her time watching and trying to free her. Gilman uses various literary elements throughout this piece, such as irony and symbolism, to portray it’s central themes of restrictive social norms
In The Story of an Hour, the main character, Mrs. Louise Mallard, is a young woman with a heart condition who learns of her husband’s untimely death in a railroad disaster. Instinctively weeping as any woman is expected to do upon learning of her husband’s death, she retires to her room to be left alone so she may collect her thoughts. However, the thoughts she collects are somewhat unexpected. Louise is conflicted with the feelings and emotions that are “approaching to possess her...” (Chopin 338). Unexpectedly, joy and happiness consume her with the epiphany she is “free, free, free!” (Chopin 338). Louise becomes more alive with the realization she will no longer be oppressed by the marriage as many women of her day were, and hopes for a long life when only the day prior, “…she had thought with a shudder that life may ...
Chopin, Kate. "The Story of an Hour." Heritage of American Literature. Ed. James E. Miller. Vol. 2. Austin: Harcourt Brace Jovanich, 1991. 487. Print.
Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” are both centralized on the feministic views of women coming out to the world. Aside from the many differences within the two short stories, there is also similarities contained in Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” such as the same concept of the “rest treatment” was prescribed as medicine to help deal with their sickness, society’s views on the main character’s illness, and both stories parallel in the main character finding freedom in the locked rooms that they contain themselves in.
Both stories show feminism of the woman trying to become free of the male dominance. Unfortunately, the woman are not successful at becoming free. In the end, the two women’s lives are drastically
Gilman, Charlotte. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Literature a World of Writing: Stories, Poems, Plays, and Essays. Ed. David Pike, and Ana Acosta. New York: Longman, 2011. 543-51. Print.
The story of how temptations, lifestyles, and influences upon women cause their true personalities and devotions to arise and corrupt their normal existence is clearly shown in both novels. They represent how little influence women have over their own lives, although certain aspects of their lives can completely rule or take control of their surroundings and therefore change them as individual women as well.
Women have traditionally been known as the less dominant sex. Through history women have fought for equal rights and freedom. They have been stereotyped as being housewives, and bearers and nurturers of the children. Only recently with the push of the Equal Rights Amendment have women had a strong hold on the workplace alongside men. Many interesting characters in literature are conceived from the tension women have faced with men. This tension is derived from men; society, in general; and within a woman herself. Two interesting short stories, “The Yellow Wall-paper and “The Story of an Hour, “ focus on a woman’s plight near the turn of the 19th century. This era is especially interesting because it is a time in modern society when women were still treated as second class citizens. The two main characters in these stories show similarities, but they are also remarkably different in the ways they deal with their problems and life in general. These two characters will be examined to note the commonalities and differences. Although the two characters are similar in some ways, it will be shown that the woman in the “The Story of an Hour” is a stronger character based on the two important criteria of rationality and freedom.
An Analysis of Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
About the women in the story, it reminded me of pre-women's liberation movement. Before the women’s movement they lacked the autonomy to make their own decisions.
Chopin, Kate. "The Story of an Hour." The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. 4th ed. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: St. Martins, 1997. 12-15.
Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Eds. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 3rd ed. New York: Pearson, 2010. 261-263. Print.