The Yellow Wallpaper And The Story Of An Hour

Society allowed women to feel trapped in their marriage by telling them they are lesser to their husbands. Although this was the way people lived prior to the Civil Rights Movement the treatment of women in their marriage is not always talked about. Kate Chopin depicts the feelings a woman went through after hearing her husband had died in an accident, misread as grief, the freedom she felt dropped when her husband walked through the door. Charlotte Perkins Gilman captures the story of how a woman was sent into a bad mental state due to her husband constantly ignoring her health concerns. In The Story of an Hour and The Yellow Wallpaper, Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilmore demonstrate the oppression of women as the inferior gender through

With husbands having complete control over their wives, the feeling of being trapped became more prevalent. Despite hearing the news that her husband was listed as dead in an accident, Louise had ¨a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory" (Chopin), a response most people would find inappropriate for someone grieving. As she locked herself in her room alone all day she dreamt of what her life would now be like. When she finally leaves her room, her sister helps her downstairs, unable to imagine how Louise was feeling. As they reach the bottom of the staircase, Louise is overcome with a feeling, "There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully" (Chopin). Watching her husband walk through the front door, changes her mood drastically. The way it is imagined for someone to be grieving after the loss of a significant other is vastly different from how Louise acts. Throughout the entirety of the story, it is obvious that Louise feels a sense of relief after hearing the hard news showing that she is finally free from a relationship where she felt trapped and

At the very beginning of The Story of an Hour, “Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death” (Chopin). Regardless of the acknowledgement of her heart condition, her illness was still being undermined. While thinking that this news would lead to her getting sick or dying, what her sister didn't know was that, "...at Richards’ quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife. Richards was too late. When the doctors came they said she had died of a heart disease — of joy that kills''(Chopin). Both Lousie´s sister and doctor believed that she was simply overjoyed at the sight of her husband. What they overlooked was how she really felt. Although it wasn't necessarily her husband telling her she had nothing wrong with her, the fact that she was the inferior gender in this time period, shows the way that her being ill was nonetheless overlooked. Her husband's unexpected reappearance ends the delusion based on "a monstrous joy," it is apparent that the last line is ironic and that she does in fact die from joy, just the joy she had felt thinking her husband was dead (Lawrence). While her condition was at least recognized, in The Yellow Wallpaper, Jane was given no credit to