Comparing The Yellow Wallpaper And Woman Hollering Creek

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Woman Hollering Creek” by Sandra Cisneros, and “Girl” by Jamaica Kincaid are riveting short stories that focus on the roles of females in a world dominated by unmitigated male dominance. The Yellow Wallpaper is about a subservient woman who is sick and prescribed the rest cure by the will of her husband. She disregards her own physical and emotional wellness, allowing her husband full control of her actions and health until she eventually loses her sanity. Woman Hollering Creek focuses on a woman named Cleófilas who marries a man that later begins to inflict physical and mental harm upon her. However, She does not leave her relationship because she is stricken with love for him. Moreover,

she is a housewife with no occupation to support neither herself nor her child. She stays in an emotionally and physically traumatizing relationship for so long until she finally gets the courage to reach out to another woman and escape. The story “Girl” is about a young woman who is explicitly told the manners and duties of how a woman should behave. Her mother indirectly emphasizing that her role as a woman is to be a housewife, and to one day obey a husband. The stories focus on the everlasting submissive role of women that has been accepted as normality, and been passed down onto the each generation of women. The authors’ implement multiple similar ideas into their stories such as male supremacy over their wives, a woman’s basic objective in society, and the oppression they endure. The central focus in all three stories is that the concept of protectionism continues to persist, leading to severe gender inequality, ultimately weakening the female dominance in a male oriented society.