Similarities Between The Yellow Wallpaper And Trifles

Abstract

Both Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Susan Glaspell's Trifles piece the themes of the risky nature of repression, the treatment of women, and isolation. Both women are victims of a domestic prison and a prison for their own mind, created by society and their husbands, who are sufferers themselves in a way, of a Gilded Age mentality. The women have no voice, authority, or ability to make their own decisions. Their intellect and inspiration is considered a lighthearted obstacle and a interference from their only jobs as homemakers. There is satire in the conclusions of these stories in that the victims/women turn the tables on their oppressors. In Trifles, the women realize they must bond together against their ignorant husbands to see justice is done. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator frees herself from her jail and keeper and forms herself another reality, where she is free in her own mind from what is persecuting, despite her concrete captivity. Even though the authors tell their stories in different ways; both uncover male dominance to be an illusion and its certain results of separation and loneliness to be

Gilman began to suffer from post-partum depression and was referred to Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell, a prominent expert in women’s nervous disorders in the nineteenth century (DeShazer, 2001). He diagnosed Gilman with neurasthenia and prescribed a “rest cure” of obligatory sedentariness. Dr. Weir Mitchell thought that nervous depression was a result of overcharged nerves and ordered Gilman to stop all forms of creative activity, including writing, for the rest of her life (Stiles, 2012). The goal of the treatment was to encourage domesticity and calm her restless nerves. “The Yellow Wallpaper,” was an insight of her own life to the extreme and is encumbered with symbolism as