Gender Roles And Marriage In The Chrysanthemums And The Story Of An Hour

Gender roles and marriage the two short stories that I decided to compare and contrast is “Story of An Hour” by: Kate Chopin; and “The chrysanthemums” by John Steinbeck. In “The Story of An Hour” the author talks about a woman who is married and finds out that her husband has been killed in a train accident. Her first reaction is devastation she starts crying historically then she goes into her room and thinks about her new found freedom. She looks out the window seeing all this new life and thinks about how hers is going to be, as this new independent woman she is now free. This feeling of freedom of marriage excites her but then she finds out that he still alive and all of her new found freedom is taken away from here this gives her a heart attack. In the story of “The Chrysanthemums” there is a married couple. Their marriage was a typical marriage for back in the day when women were expected to take care of the home and garden and men were expected to work all day to be the bread winner for the family. Elisa Allen, henry wife loves to work in the garden on her chrysanthemums she is a very strong and beautiful women. She wants to do more on the business side of the relationship but she knows that this is not for a women. Both of these stories are very similar in the ways that women were treated in the past. They were treated like they were not good enough to do a man’s job and they had less rights then men did in the past. The two women in the short stories I read have similar experiences of being oppressed by men but the overall outcome was different for both women. The reason why I thought this was because the authors of the stories differ in gender this plays a huge role on how the two main women characters stories ended.

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...onely life for a woman, ma’am, and a scary life, too, with animals creeping under the wagon all night”. Elisa try’s to be a strong woman you see this when the tinker in the wagon says his life is no life for a woman she shows “Her upper lip raised a little, showing her teeth. “How do you know? How can you tell?” she said”. (Steinbeck 247) Elisa gets very mad when she is told that she can’t to something that a man can do. But in the end she gives up trying to be an equal not only in her marriage but as a woman in society as well. The author of this short story is a male named John Steinbeck he wrote this story in 1938 when women where on the verge of becoming more equal to men to have their voice herd more than in would in the 1800. However, women still where discriminated by men and this shown in his story. John Steinbeck writes his views on women that are trying