Susan Glaspell's The Yellow Wall-Paper

The progressive era surrounding the turn of the twentieth century were full of shifting emotions in the populace. The idea of prohibition was gaining momentum in the minds of housewives leading up to the eighteenth amendment. Even as women were gaining bargaining room they still were seen as weaker to their husbands and other males of their life. The Yellow Wall-Paper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, published in 1892 gives an insight into the beginning of this progressive era. On the other side in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles, from 1916, we see a similar lack of respect towards women. Although these stories are different, there is still evidence of women going against the social norms.

When one becomes confined to solitary oftentimes the brain will entertain itself within the environment it finds itself. Locked away in an attic nursery we see Gilman’s narrator occupying herself with the wallpaper. In the beginning of The Yellow Wall-Paper the narrator see’s that her husband believes she is hysterical for a term; whereas, she believed there was something wrong (Gilman 486). The narrator sees rest as her last concern, she wants to be able to work and write so she ends up doing so in secret (Gilman 487). With each segment, she grows

Wright had done anything. This was still a point where women were considered much weaker than men. The women were asked to gather up her things while the men saw to the crime scene, this lead to the discovery of a songbird wrapped in silk with a wrung neck (Glaspell 750). The ladies are quick to determine what had happened and hid the evidence, and at the end taking it out in Mrs. Hale’s pocket. The men spend much of their time conversing on their own not giving much thought to the idea of Mrs. Wright having strangled her husband. Towards the end they mention the idea but without evidence they know no jury would convict Mrs. Wright for John Wright’s