A Prison Without Bar Analysis

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A Prison Without Bars Women had a much different role in the late nineteenth century than they do in this day and age. The role of the wife was to be subservient to the men, and to bear children to carry on his name. Husbands dictated their wives everyday activities. It wasn’t widely accepted that women had a say in what happened in society. It was highly frowned upon for a woman to entertain the idea of taking up a profession. It was male-dominated and women were basically their just to clean up the mess, in men’s eyes. The theme of male oppression onto women causing them to seek freedom, is very prevalent in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, The Yellow Wallpaper, and in Kate Chopin’s, A Story of an Hour. Both of these stories were written around …show more content…

Even the very fact that Chopin, chose to leave this woman unnamed shows a lack of power and imprisonment. We learn that she is ill and needs to take time herself to heal. She has been taken away from her newborn baby. Jon, having the occupation of a turn-of-the-century physician, thought that sheltering his wife and having her refrain from any activity and rest would help her get better. The woman writes in her journal even though John instructed her not to do so. He does not allocate any type of stimulation, mental or physical. John takes her freedoms and luxuries away. She can’t have visitors or go away to visit anyone. “When I get really well, John says we will ask Cousin Henry and Julia down for a long visit; but he says he would as soon put fireworks in my pillow-case as to let me have those stimulating people about now.” (Gilman 65) She is imprisoned in her bedroom, along with everything else in the nursery, like her bed. “I lie here on this great immovable bed—it is nailed down, I believe—” (Gilman 97) It is almost like the nursery is mocking her, because it makes her even more ill. As it would if a mother who had post-pardum depression was locked in such an ironically atrocious room. Her whole life becomes a prison, and eventually she just gives up and finally feels free. "I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've …show more content…

The wallpaper also represents her lack of power. She creeps by day and stays still by the moonlight. She animates herself through the wallpaper, because she ‘creeps’ when John is away treating people, and is still by night when he is home, because he would see her and not approve of her actions. The woman does all she can do to tear off the paper, and in the end, ends up becoming one with the paper. It seemed when the wife focused more and more on the wallpaper, her condition continued to develop. Patterns started to develop in the wallpaper when she stared at it for a long time, and she started to see shapes and shadows in it. She saw bars, which made the room her literal prison, and she saw the shadows which could be the way that the woman depicted herself in this time, as a shadow of her former self: Before the baby, before the illness, when she was healthy. Both of these stories are symbolically women crying out for acceptance as equal members in

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