Similarities Between The Yellow Wallpaper And Trifles

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century, women were not treated equivalent to men. There was an evident divide between the gender roles of that time. Women’s health in a psychological, social and physical way was not essentially important. Men felt as if women were just emotional and that their issues were of no importance. Women had very little authority over their lives and it was as if their husband owned them. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow wallpaper” and Susan Glaspell’s play “Trifles” are alike in some respect; they both assess the situation of marriage and the divided genders with society’s criticism and impartiality toward women. For Gilman, the nineteenth-century story reveals the fact that this gender

The most common treatment of that time, according to Diana Martin, M.D of the American Journal of Psychiatry, was called the rest cure: “which was prescribed almost exclusively for women, had three core elements: isolation, rest, and feeding (737). The narrator’s so-called “rest cure” which was prescribed is overall making her condition worse. She is forced to become completely passive, prohibited from exercising her mind in any way. Writing, which brings her much joy, is especially off limits― “There comes John, and I must put this away,--he hates to have me write a word” (Gilman 377). She is always looking for constant relief that she is unable to find. She eventually unknowingly obsesses over the wallpaper, which is her way of trying to escape her husband. According to Barbra Welter, who published an article for American Quarterly, women of the times did not have the luxury of thinking for themselves, for “when she bestows her greatest treasure upon her husband, from that time on [she] is completely dependent upon him, an empty vessel, without legal or emotional existence of her own”