Haley Muggy Basuli SURVEY WOMENS LIT ENGL315A SEC 001 3/14/13 Option #2 The Yellow Wallpaper and its’ Relation to Sandra Fluke From the very beginning of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, it is clear that the main character is being oppressed and demeaned by her husband John. “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage,” she writes about her husbands’ reaction to her questions about their future summer home. The fact that she says that being mocked is expected in marriage is a sad thought, and makes me hope that we have come a long way when it comes to marital relationships since this story was written. This story is set in the 19th century, and was written to draw attention to the need for women’s physical and mental health to be taken more seriously. “Hysteria” was a common diagnosis seen in only women for hundreds of years in Western Europe.
Although Mrs. Mallard loved her husband the overwhelming thought of a life without him brought about emotions that she had buried inside which was a sense of freedom. The theme of this story comes together as Mrs. Mallard descends to her room to be alone. Mrs. Mallard was a sickly women afflicted with heart trouble. Her ailment was known to her family and friends. When the word come down that her husband had been in a train accident and feared dead her family and friends knew to break the news to her as easily as they possibly could.
We will sum up the key argument and the perception of women before the 20th century. In ‘The Story of an Hour,’ Louise Mallard has a heart condition, and she must be told of her husband’s death with great care and compassion. Her sister, Josephine, tells her the news along with Mr. Mallard’s good friend, Richards, who had learned of the death while at a newspaper facility. Mrs. Mallard begins to weep as she is told of her husband’s death and goes upstairs to her room. While in her room she discovers a scary feeling that had come across her and does not know how to take it.
It is, therefore, the motivating factor behind the two women’s search of liberation. Both women are oppressed by their husbands, and this curtails their happiness. In The Yellow Wallpaper,” John, a narrator’s spouse, confines his wife in a room with barred windows and hideous wallpaper that is yellow by its color at the countryside vacation house because she is ill. He deprives her freedom of communication by confining her in the room. He also puts her under the intense scrutiny.
Story of an Hour and Yellow Wallpaper It was the norm of the society in the nineteenth century to have women dependent on the males. Women were most often than not, regulated by their spouses, and were expected to do nothing but make life, and living, an easy experience for their husbands; in return, the women of that era, were loved, protected, and cared for by their husbands. It was while ensuring that these norms of the society were maintained, that both women in the short stories, “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, were destroyed by death and madness respectively. In the two stories, both women were trapped in a situation in which they would have preferred not to be in, with the husband and the expectation of the society being the cause of their imprisonment. However, it should be understood that in neither of the situations were the husband’s actions intentionally done; instead, they too were living up to society’s expectations in order to maintain social order.
So every time Blanche gets sad or feels depressed she remembers her husband and hears the music. Blanche remembers her dead husband because she blames herself for his death. She blames herself because right before Allen committed suicide she told him that “he disgusts her.” She tells him that because she catches Allen with another man. At first she acts like it didn’t bother her and offers to go dancing but when they were dancing to the Polka music she tells him that he disgusts her and a moment after we hear a gun shot. Allen committed suicide because Blanche mentioned those words to him.
In the beginning of the play, she witnesses her husband sleeping with an older man. After her confrontation with him, he runs outside and commits suicide by putting the gun through his mouth outside in public. Blanche felt that the secret was out about her husband’s gay affair so she becomes extremely provocative to show and feel that she is still desired. In this case it shows that she is very weak and cannot hold up without having a man. When she loses all her many in her promiscuous ways, she decides to go stay with her sister Stella and her husband Stanley.
The play ends with a doctor and a matron taking Blanche away to an insane asylum as Stella cries as she realizes she has lost her only sister. Throughout the play, a few themes emerged predominantly. First, Blanche seems to use to sex to avoid aging and to avoid the horrid image of seeing her lover with a man and the resulting suicide after her verbal attack on him. The event of her lover killing himself after she said, “I saw! I know!
Some grieve over words that can never be said or heard, others over someone they won’t see again, and so on. Abby grieves over her marriage as she reveals to Oskar that, “My husband and I had been having a terrible fight” (Foer 290). William Black, her ex-husband is able to attain closure when Oskar gives him the key to a safe that belonged to his deceased father. A.R. Black grieves over his wife’s death by hammering nails into their bed and for his loss of hearing.
The “Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Story of an Hour” are both centralized on the feministic view of women about their marriage in the nineteenth century. Both women in these two stories are repressed by their husband, as men have more power and rights than women do at that time. Two female protagonists seem to have the same fate in their marriage, at the end of the stories they even scarify their life to get back their freedom. However, these two characters have their own way to deal with their difficulties and have different responses to their own freedom. Both of these female protagonists are fighting for freedoms.