What Are The Similarities Between The Yellow Wallpaper And The Story Of An Hour

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“The Story of an Hour” and “The Yellow Wall-paper” are two stories that describe the struggle women have in marriage and the effect it has on their health in interesting short stories. In both “The Story of an Hour” and “The Yellow Wall-paper”, the main characters, Jane and Ms. Mallard, struggle with voicelessness and inequality in their marriage, which lead to their deteriorating mental and physical health. In “The Yellow Wall-paper”, the narrator takes a fascination in a peculiar yellow wallpaper, getting increasingly obsessed with it and seeing herself in the pattern as ‘the woman behind bars’ because of her marriage. The story starts off with her husband, John, a physician, telling her that she had a “slight hysterical tendency”, so they temporarily moved into a house with plenty of fresh air and …show more content…

For one, she observed that “by daylight [the woman in the paper] is subdued, quiet” and that “it is the paper that keeps her so still”, and that the pattern is what keeps the narrator “quiet by the hour” and subdued as well (518). She continued to get progressively more and more obsessed and possessive of the room, even saying that she was actually “getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper”, and when Jennie was looking at the pattern too, the narrator is determined that “nobody shall find it out but [her]self!” (515, 519). Towards the end of the story, she, although unknowingly, made a connection between herself and the woman in the wall paper, her marriage and the pattern in the wallpaper, the bars. She even admits it, saying that she can see the women all the time, creeping, and says “I always lock the door when I creep by daylight. I can't do it at night, for I know John would suspect something at once”, meaning that when John