Essay Comparing The Yellow Wallpaper And The Story Of An Hour

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The late 1800s were a time of oppression for many women in America. Women had few rights and were trapped behind belittling stereotypes of keeping only to housework and living as stay at home mothers instead of pursuing careers of their own. Feminist writers, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin, challenged these ideas. Their short stories, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Story of an Hour”, use interesting female protagonists to embody how oppression negatively affected the mental and emotional state of women. Though these stories both center around similar themes of the mistreatment of women, each character has a different way of dealing with it; one allows it to take over her mental state, which ultimately drives her mad, and the other allows it to take over her emotional state, which ultimately kills her. In Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrators’ condition is mentioned from the first diary entry. Her husband calls it only a “slight hysterical tendency”, but she feels it is something much worse. The narrator disagrees with her …show more content…
After hearing about her husbands supposed death, Louise genuinely weeps at first, but then begins thinking about the possibilities of a life without her husband’s control over her. While contemplating the previous events alone, Louise feels too excited about the thought of independence to grieve over her husband. “She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long” (Chopin 550). Before her husband’s death, Louise lived a dull, dependent life and had no hope for the future. She is now more than hopeful that she will live a long, happy life. Louise is so overcome by ecstatic emotions, when she discovers that her husband is actually alive, she dies of heart disease, unable to return to the life she thought she had
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Essay Comparing Story Of An Hour And The Yellow Wallpaper

In both short stories, “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, reveals, the conflict of housewives seeking for freedom and independence from their husband during the late 19th century: a time period where women did not really had rights in society, they were viewed as second-class citizens and their lives were controlled by their husbands. The Story of an Hour is about a fragile woman who is suffering from a heart disease, called Mrs. Mallard…

Words 1037 - Pages 5