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Compare And Contrast The Yellow Wallpaper And The Story Of An Hour

1014 Words5 Pages

Comparison Essay Draft
Lisa Reyes, SN
Galen College of Nursing Comparison Essay Draft
"The Yellow Wallpaper,” written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “The Story of an Hour,” written by Kate Chopin, are very similar, being that both women in the two short stories feel trapped by their husbands, along with a feeling of helplessness. Both women long for the day they can feel freedom, if that day were to ever come. In a time when women are expected to be submissive to their husband and tend to household duties, these two women yearned to break free from their enslaved life. They not only have to deal with the institution of marriage, but also the medical issues they each had to endure. This essay will compare the themes of oppression, …show more content…

In, “The Story of an Hour, “Mrs. Mallard is over come with joy at the thought of living the rest of her days for herself and herself alone” (Chopin, p15). Knowing that each day from that point on would be spend by herself, and with no one else unless she allowed that person in. She seems to be excited to start this new life as an individual being, with no one other than herself in complete control of her life. The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” longs for that same sort of freedom. Throughout the story, she stares at this horrific looking yellow wallpaper in the room she feels imprisoned in. She believes that there is a woman is trapped behind the paper that stares back at her, reaching out to her as if there is something to be said. The woman behind the paper symbolizes narrator and her way of expressing her feelings of entrapment. The woman in the wallpaper is trying to break free from the walls. When the narrator finally reaches her breaking point she yells out, "I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" She believes that it was herself who was trapped in the wall paper the whole

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She becomes obsessive over the woman in the wallpaper, theorizing that the wallpaper moves because of the woman, and assumes that the woman can escape from the wallpaper. At the end of the story, the narrator locks herself in her room and throws the key to ensure that she will catch the woman in the wallpaper. When her husband John unlocks the

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Then after this she kinda just went beyond crazy. “I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane. And i’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can 't put me back.” She wanted the woman in the yellow wallpaper to escape so she helped her out. Because her husband traumatized her she was always nervous and emotional.

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The narrator writes “I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was that showed behind, that dim sub-pattern, but now I am quite sure it is a woman” (Gilman). As the author of The Blume Blog points out, “she does not seem to waiver at all in thinking that the ‘thing’ behind the wallpaper is specifically a woman,” indicating that the narrator is, perhaps unconsciously, starting to recognize herself in the woman behind the bars of the wallpaper. It’s no longer just in the wallpaper that the narrator sees this other woman either. She sees her in the garden “on that long road under the trees, creeping along” and hiding “under the blackberry vines” (Gilman). The narrator even starts to act as the woman in the wallpaper does by ‘creeping’ around the room, and the hallucinations of seeing this woman outside suggests the narrator’s own desire to escape and “be free of the reformatory she has been living in” (The Blume).

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