Trapped In the short story “The Yellow Newspaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the play Trifles by Susan Glaspell, both authors show clear underlying feminist themes. The authors use a similar theme to show the repression and treatment of women, marriage as a prison that limits women and the alienation of women within their marriage.
Both the narrator of Gilman's story and Mrs. Wright, formerly Minnie Foster, suffer deeply from repressive acts upon their artistic spirits. For instance, the unnamed narrator has the keen sight of an artist who loves symmetry, and flowers and nature, while Minnie loves music, quilting, and songbirds. But, both women are forced to live under the starkest of conditions that deprive them of human companionship…show more content… In Trifles, in a similar fashion, out of her deprivation of human communication, Minnie purchases a canary who sings to her, as she once did herself when she was young and happy. The repetition of repressive acts against Gilman's narrator and Mrs. Wright clearly break down their spirits and endanger their minds. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator feels so repressed and virtually trapped in the room with the "hideous" walls covered with an asymmetrical pattern that she becomes delusional, imagining a woman behinds the "bars" of the wallpaper's lines who struggles to free herself. Eventually, her husband finds her insanely crawling along the floor; she tells him, "I've got out at last...in spite of you...and…show more content… The women are casualties of a domestic prison, a prison for the mind, created by society and their husbands who are victims themselves in their own way of thinking. The women have no voice and no authority. Their intellect and creativity is considered a frivolous obstacle and a distraction from their jobs and house duties. Because of the way the men treated women in Trifles the women were viewed in such a way that if important leads were discovered by them, this information would than become useless. Both women “ultimately find power in being devalued, for their low status allows them to keep quiet at the play's end.” (Holstein). Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters take advantage of this position to not get discovered with vital knowledge that would surely solve the
