In Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen,” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” both the protagonist in each of their respected stories experiences different types of emotional turmoil and as a result causes their isolation from the world and the people around them. The emotional and physical battles both these characters undergo reveal many striking similarities, despite the origin of their provoking thoughts and actions. Susan in “To Room Nineteen” goes through a journey in search for stillness and peace in her life by removing herself from her children, husband, and house keeper. It takes her to several different locations in order to uncover what she is looking for, but instead she is faced with a masked figure conjured up in her own mind. The main character in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is diagnosed with post partum depression and begins to manifest a morbid fixation on the yellow wallpaper in her room.
Analytical paper # 2 Due: October 24, 2012 “The Yellow Wallpaper” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is the story of a young woman whose creative appeal and self-expression are suppressed by her society and her marriage. The short story is told by the narrator through her diary, which she describes as an exemption of her thoughts. The narrator is apparently artistic and creative as can be seen through her animated descriptions of the house her husband John has rented. The narrator includes representations of the yellow wallpaper in the upstairs nursery where she and her husband sleep at night. The wallpaper is used characterically to reflect the marriage the narrator finds herself ambushed inside.
Her husband is gone from the house more often, to take care of the patients with serious conditions, leaving her with Jennie, his sister. She feels alone and her imagination makes up these apparitions in the wallpaper to keep her amused. She starts seeing a woman creeping in the wallpaper. The woman scares her and she wants to move into a different room to escape her phantom presence. Her imagining this woman is representing the narrator subconsciously realizing that she might me going crazy and that fact scares her and she wants to escape the empty room that leaves her to her
The Story of an Hour As the title puts it, “The Story of an Hour” is a story that happens in one hour. This story mostly revolves around one woman, Louise Mallard. The story begins on a very sad note especially in the eyes of a reader. Mrs. Mallard is said to have a “heart trouble” (Chopin 1), so her sister Josephine felt that great care had to be taken when delivering the sad news of her husband Brently Mallard’s death. Upon the delivery of the news, she starts sobbing and grieving then goes to her room to be by herself.
However, the piece is so much more than a simple horror story; it is a deceptively hidden but powerful essay on female equality and marriage, two topics about which Gilman wrote frequently. Through the
Merely Teasing Charlotte Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” both demonstrate how society, at the turn of the century, seemed to make women feel enclosed or trapped. The narrator in “Yellow Wallpaper” and the main character in Chopin’s story, Louise Mallard share many of the same desires and characteristics. Their desire to get out and be independent eventually gets them punished. In both stories, it is clear that the narrator or character is a female. From the way the narrator talks in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” describing her husband and house and the decorations, it is obvious she is a female.
It is literally a prison that holds back the women behind the wallpaper as they try to escape and it is figuratively the jail that holds the narrator prisoner. The narrator's feels a sense of being watched by the wallpaper which accentuates the idea of a prison. It emphasizes the theme of how confinement and forced submission for women into the domestic life can drive any person insane. The wallpaper is a condensed version of all of society. It wallpaper traps the narrator as she comes to identify with, and later become, the woman in the wallpaper.
She untangles its chaotic pattern and locates the figure of a woman struggling to break free from the bars in the pattern. Over time, as her insanity deepens, she identifies completely with this woman and believes that she, too, is trapped within the wallpaper. When she tears down the wallpaper over her last couple of nights, she believes that she has finally broken out of the wallpaper within which John has imprisoned her. The wallpaper's yellow color has many possible associations - with jaundiced sickness, with discriminated-against minorities of the time (especially the Chinese), and with the rigid oppression of masculine sunlight. By tearing it down, the narrator emerges from the wallpaper and asserts her own identity, albeit a somewhat confused, insane one.
The spots of the wallpaper that have been torn off represent the women that have come before her that have had the same desires to escape from the sphere of domesticity in which women are bound. As the figure within the wallpaper begins to become apparent to the narrator, she cannot determine whether it is one woman or multiple women that are stuck behind the wallpaper. Describing the multiple heads she believes she is seeing, the narrator says, “They get through, and then the pattern strangles them off and turns them upside down, and makes their eyes white” (99). These heads were
Most analyses of this piece have been from prominent feminists, who targeted the patriarchal structure of the society in the 19th century as the major cause of insanity of the narrator. Some of the most extreme feminist critics have even stepped further to claim that the narrator is initially not ill at all, hinting that the societal bonds of marriage imprisoned and twisted the mind of the poor narrator. Though this claim has not yet been verified, there are indeed several conspicuous signs that showcased societal imprisonment of women in The Yellow Wallpaper. For example, John’s overconfidence of his own medical knowledge led to his misjudgment of the narrator’s condition; whereas societal norms seem to force the narrator to believe in that misjudgment: “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do? (1.10)” And under these torturing social rules,[change] the narrator, as a women and a wife, has no control over the pettiest details of her life, and she can do nothing for herself except from asking help from men, who dictates her life: “My brother is also a physician, and also of high standing, and he says the same thing” (1.11) And it is obvious that the chauvinistic ideas during