Comparing Women Protagonists In The Awakening And The Yellow Wallpaper

America in the nineteenth century was a time that many upper and middle class women were socialized to become the epitome of perfection and domesticity, with their identities deeply bound up in their relation to men. Rula Quawas discusses this point by presenting the four attributes of ‘the cult of true womanhood’ that governed the lives of these Victorian women: “’Piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity’. Put together they ‘spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife – woman” (35). These are the oppressive ideologies that the women protagonists in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) are reacting against. Both stories begin as Edna and The Yellow Wallpaper’s unnamed narrator come to

The Yellow Wallpaper’s John is the narrator’s husband and doctor, who orders her the “rest cure” in the wake of her “nervous condition” shortly after giving birth. In the beginning, the narrator demonstrates the ways that John belittles her illness and her thoughts in general. For example, after she tells John that she finds the house to be ‘queer’ she writes, “John laughs at me of course, but one expects that in marriage” (792). John also takes to using pet names for his wife throughout the story as another form of belittlement. In one passage, John finds the narrator up in the middle of the night examining the wallpaper: “‘what is it little girl?’ he said. ‘Don’t go walking about like that – you’ll get a cold’” (798). On another occasion he belittles her illness by stating, “’Bless her little heart!’ he said with a big hug, ‘she shall be as sick as she pleases!” (798). And earlier refers to her has a “blessed little goose” (794). It is this kind of fatherly tone that is used to demean and silence her thoughts. In accordance to the rest cure, as Quawas notes, these forms of belittlement emphasize “the infantilized, passive role expected of women at the time”