Comparing The Chrysanthemums And The Yellow Wallpaper

Analysis of “The Chrysanthemums” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Steinbeck’s The Chrysanthemums and Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper each portrays a married woman who feels trapped and utterly isolated by the gender oppression of her time. Although the characters and events in both stories are vividly depicted through ordinary verbal descriptions, the most distinctive and effective element in both stories is the use of symbolism in delineating character, conflict, and the underlying theme.

Written in third person, objective point of view, Steinbeck narrates The Chrysanthemums as an outsider describing the events and circumstances of the story in a non-intrusive, objective manner. The central symbol of story is the flowers themselves, which symbolizes the character of the protagonist, Elisa. Like the strong ten-inch Chrysanthemums she grows, Elisa is herself full of strength and energy: “Her face was lean and strong and her eyes were as clear as water. (Guth 222)” As she takes pride in growing her Chrysanthemums “bigger than anybody around here” (225), Elisa is herself “over-eager,

over-powerful” (222). One can get the sense from these descriptions that Elisa is a highly productive woman who possesses a strong desire and eagerness to produce something extraordinary with her creative energy. Her possession of strength is further reinforced by her somewhat masculine appearance and demeanor depicted at the beginning of the story: “Her face looked blocked and heavy in her gardening costume, a man’s black hat pulled low down over her eyes, clodhopper shoes…” Brushing away hair from her eyes, she leaves “a smudge of earth on her cheek…” Hence, contrary to what one might expect from a married woman of her time, Elisa clearly has no reservations about getting her hands dirty and performing physically laborious work. Moreover, Elisa expresses a desire to assume a man’s role in a male-dominated society. When confronted with the tinker about the prospect of a woman taking up a job such as his, Elisa says, “You might be surprised to have a rival some time. I can sharpen scissors, too. And I can beat the dents out of little pots. I could show you what a woman might do.” (227) In saying so, Elisa emphatically demonstrates her strength and will through her dissatisfaction with her given role as a woman in a male-dominated society and her desire to compete with men.
On the other hand, Elisa clearly has a more fragile and feminine side. Just as her Chrysanthemums, despite their size and strength, are, nonetheless, only delicate flowers, Elisa is, herself, but a refined and delicate woman who knows to play the feminine role given to her by society. This is clearly portrayed by her highly tamed, submissive, and respectful conversations with her husband. When her husband suggests that they have dinner at the Cominos Hotel and a movie afterwards without so much as asking for her opinion or suggestion, Elisa simply agrees without objection. In preparing for the dinner, Elisa puts on “her newest underclothing and her nicest stockings and the dress which was the symbol of her prettiness. She worked carefully on her hair, penciled her eyebrows and rouged her lips.” (227) In doing so, she transforms from a somewhat rugged-appearing gardener with aspirations to take up male roles to a graceful, passive, and beautiful wife. This duality of masculine and feminine qualities exists both in Elisa and the nature of the Chrysanthemums that represent her.
The use of the Chrysanthemums as a symbol representing Elisa culminates in a climatic moment, when Elisa discovers that the tinker disposed of the flowers she gave him. What hurts her more than the fact that the tinker had thrown her precious flowers away is that he kept the new pot in which she placed the Chrysanthemum sprouts earlier; hence the reason he was unable to throw the sprouts far enough off the road and out of sight. As such, it painfully dawns upon her that the one man who, for once, expressed interest in her creative passion and ambition amidst the social repression and isolation she experiences, pretended so only to manipulate her. Having opened the door to her intimate passion to this man and believed that she shared it with him as an equal, only to realize that their encounter rooted in lies and deceit, Elisa’s aspiration to be accepted as an equal in a man’s world is crushed. As the once strong and lively Chrysanthemums are abandoned and left to wilt on the road, so Elisa loses her strength and youthful energy, and cries weakly, “like an old woman”.
A central theme of The Chrysanthemums is that of a socially isolated woman, Eliza, who strives to be accepted as an equal in a male-dominated society. As Marilyn H. Mitchell writes in her column in Southwest Review dated summer of 1976, “Steinbeck reveals fundamental differences between the way women see themselves and the way they are viewed by men.” (232) The nature of the conflict arising from this theme, according to Mitchell, is rooted in “the propensity of the men to see their wives as dependent inferiors, while the women perceive themselves as being equal if not superior partners”, thus creating a strain that is “responsible for the isolation of each of the characters”.
In The Yellow Wallpaper, by Gilman, an unnamed woman is quickly driven from a state of postpartum depression to madness by her husband’s idea of a treatment plan for her depression. Written in a first person autobiographical point of view, Gilman treats the story as if it were a diary of the narrator, in which every word written is part of her entry into a journal kept through her stay at the old house. These entries are not meant to appear clearly thought out or coherent, but, rather, a series of scattered and random thoughts, as one may expect from a person suffering from mentally illness.
Like The Chrysanthemums, the central symbol of The Yellow Wallpaper is the subject of the title itself.

However, whereas the chrysanthemum is used to symbolize Elisa’s character, the yellow wallpaper is used to depict the mental state of the unnamed narrator as she deteriorates from a state of depression to ever worsening episodes of schizophrenia. In her initial description of the yellow wallpaper, the woman writes: “It has stripped off...in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach…one of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.” (235) Here begins her sickly obsession with the wallpaper: “It is dull enough to confuse the eye in following, pronounced enough to constantly irritate and provoke study…the color is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow…I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room

long.”
Following the first entry she makes into her “journal”, the woman’s observations of the wallpaper, even though vivid in detail, become incoherent and bizarre, just as her mental soundness begins to disintegrate. With each entry she makes, the woman’s obsession with every minute of the wallpaper becomes more compulsive, and her observations and analyses of the wallpaper quickly turn into sheer hallucinations when she begins to make out a woman in the wallpaper: “it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern…the faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.” (239) At this point, one can get the sense that this is a case of self-projection, in which the woman trapped inside the wallpaper is really the narrator herself. Just as narrator wants desperately to leave the room, the figure in the wallpaper is trying to get out. Her torturous stay inside the room becomes a form of imprisonment: “At night in any kind of light, in twilight, candlelight, lamplight, and worst of all by moonlight, it becomes bars!” (241) In the climatic ending, the narrator symbolically liberates herself from her own imprisonment by peeling away the wallpaper and liberating the figure trapped inside the bars: “ As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her…I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper.” (244) At the end of the story, the narrator verbalizes this symbolic act of freedom, “I’ve got out at last…and I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”
The theme of The yellow wallpaper, like that of The Chrysanthemums, is that is a woman trapped in a world in which her creativity and ambitions are hindered and oppressed by the men in her life. Whereas she wants to be a writer, her husband tells her to keep her creative and imaginative tendencies in check, keeping her locked in a state of creative isolation. As the narrator confesses, “it is so discouraging not to have any advice and companionship about my work.” (234) Moreover, the theme of this story applies not only to the woman herself, but also to the oppressed women of her time in general. The symbolic use of the wallpaper most clearly demonstrates this point. Amidst the narrator’s hallucination of a womanly figure shaking the bars inside the imprisonment of the wallpaper, she writes: “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind…she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern-it strangles so; I think that is why is has so many heads.” This symbolizes the oppression experienced by the women of her time, all trying to climb through the limitations set for them by society. Unable to succeed in overcoming these limitations, they “strangle” in their social imprisonment. Moreover, any creative ambition of a woman can only be fulfilled in isolation and secrecy from society; hence the “creeping” the narrator refers to at the end of the story: “…there are so many of those creeping women…I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?” (245) In a discussion of this story by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, they elaborate on how it relates to woman writers in general: “ Indistinct and yet rapid, barely perceptible but inexorable, the progress of that cloud shadow is not unlike the progress of the nineteenth-century literary women out of the texts defined by patriarchal poetics into the open spaces of their own authority. That such an escape from the numb world behind the patterned walls of the text was a flight from disease into health was quite clear to Gilman herself.” (419)
As with other indirect literary devices such as irony or satire, symbolism is a powerful way of conveying underlying elements of a story to readers in a manner not possible through ordinary verbal descriptions. The Chrysanthemums and The Yellow Wallpaper both use symbolism effectively to instill a painful picture of the conflicts experienced by their characters and to convey the underlying themes of social isolation and gender oppression.