Comparing Kate Chopin's The Story Of An Hour And Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The outside feels so far away
Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and Charlotte Perkins Gilmans “The Yellow Wallpaper” are two stories where each female is fighting to find out who she is as a women and also overcome challenging obstacles. Both women live in the same time frame so they encountered the same type of situations and roughly the same type of issues. Each women is imprisoned within their selves with one being literally imprisoned. They’re both trapped in a time where women didn’t have much say over their lives, they basically did what the men told them too. However, to the women this is normal, because every women did as their husband asked. Throughout the stories, both women are searching for a way out. They view the outdoors

as a new found freedom and in hope that they too will be able to experience it.
Louise, the women in “The Story of an Hour”, looks out the window after hearing the news of her husband being killed in a railroad accident.

She gazes at the blue skies and acknowledges everything that’s going on outside while sitting in her comfy chair. Louise begins to feel a sense of happiness. “She said it over and over under her breath: free, free, free!” (1157) at last Louise felt like she finally had a chance to live her life the way she wanted. Louise has a heart problem, however it seems to be more of a mental problem rather than a physical one. The depression that she has felt has led her to live a life for her husband’s sake and no one has consideration of how she wants to live her own life. When Louise finds out that her husband has passed away she weeps and has grief until she realizes the good that can come from this. She now has a new freedom and begins to dream of all the wonderful pleasures of life that she will be able to enjoy now that her husband Brently has passed away. Louise fantasizes over the future she will now have to live. When she walks down the staircase, all those fantasies die all because her husband walks through the door and then with such heartbreak of her dreams being ruined she dies of a heart disease. At the ending of the story it reads “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease- of joy that kills.” (1158) Louise knew that she wouldn’t be able to live the life she had now imagined so she had to find another way

out.
The narrator, who is unnamed, in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, writes about the garden outside her room and the flowers she sees, however the window has been barred, so she continues to look back in the room. The outside is something she doesn’t get to experience because she is told to lie in bed and rest without doing anything else especially not taking part in writing. She says “I see her in those dark grape arbors, creeping all around the garden.” (560)The garden is a place that she says is beautiful and is close to how she imagines her life to be. The narrator has just given birth to a baby that she is unable to have any relations with which may have led her to become emotionally unstable. The narrator continues to say “he said” as if what she has to say never really matters. (552)
The narrator is a women with a very strong imagination and who loves to express herself through writing, however her husband doesn’t allow her to write because he has anxiety of creativity As the women becomes fixated on the yellow wallpaper that is in her room, she becomes more and more unassociated with her everyday life. She describes the pattern as “one of those sprawling, flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.” (552) The narrator begins writing secretly and hides it from her husband who disapproves of it. All of her thoughts go into her writing. She begins to believe that she is living a life like the women in the wallpaper. Soon the narrator finds out that she is the one that needs rescued. She begins to tear down the wallpaper and claims “I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane. And I’ve pulled of most of the wallpaper, so you can’t put me back!” (563) The narrator truly believes she’s the women that has been trapped in the wallpaper all along. She tears down the wallpaper so that no one can trap her again.
For Louise the outside represents the freedom and chances she believes she will have after her husband has died. The outside represents the chance of a new life without another person’s commands, a life where she can do whatever she pleases too. She feels the window itself it already giving her sense of what her life could be like. For the unnamed narrator the outside represents everything she could have, however she begin to not like looking out the window because she does not want to see. She feels she has to hide or she will only see a reflection of herself creeping outside. The outside being so far away from these characters not only means the outside literally but also being outside of the life they’re being forced to live. Both characters search for a way out of the life that their not satisfied with. Louis in “The Story of an Hour” dies of a heart disease, and the unnamed character from “The Yellow Wallpaper”