The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman was centered on themes of power, control, and oppression. The narrator is a woman who is diagnosed with temporary nervous depression by her husband and brother who are both physicians. They both refuse to deem her as sick, but she argues otherwise. She likes to exercise her imagination but her husband encourages her not to and forces her to believe what he believes. She writes as a “cure” for her sickness, but her husband, John hates for her to write. “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.” Throughout the story the narrator’s efforts and opinions are denied by her husband. He just suggests that she sleeps so she won’t have so many thoughts and ideas. John clearly has the control. He controls his wife’s thought by always denying her and making himself seem more reasonable. He uses his career title to his advantage showing that he is more knowledgeable and has all of the answers. “It is a false foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?” The narrator says, “He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.” John has made her believe he truly cares for her since he is trying to help cure her by shutting her up and making her oppress feelings. She is basically brainwashed in believing he has her best interest.
John puts his wife in a room that used to be a nursery with this awful yellow wallpaper that is very disturbing to her. He puts her in there basically as a form of meditation for her to rest during her “illness.” She constantly complains to herself about the pattern on the dull yellow wallpaper, but she doesn’t really express her hatred about it to John because he will just dismiss it. She describes a pattern in the wallpaper that a lady is trapped in and can’t get out of so she just creeps around. The narrator lives through what her imagination has built out of the wallpaper. In the end she realizes that she is that woman trapped in the wallpaper always having to creep around during the day time and behind bars at night, forced to sleep under her husband’s supervision. She is stuck in the pattern having to live the miserable controlled lifestyle with her husband who is forcing her to believe what he wants her to believe. Along with the power, control, and oppression, gender plays a role in the story. Once again the male is superior and more intellectual and the woman is trapped following his order without much say. The narrator even admits, “The fact is I am getting a little afraid of John.” She knows there is no easy escape from him.
The Story of An Hour by Kate Chopin is filled with autonomy and irony. The first fact stated in the story was, “Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble.” Mrs. Mallard’s “heart trouble” could easily symbolize the pain she is going through living with Brently Mallard, her husband who was supposedly killed in a railroad accident. The surrounding characters think that her heart trouble would be bothered from the news of her husband’s death, but really Mrs. Mallard feels a sense of freedom now that he is gone. Despite the pain that Mr. Mallard had out her through, Mrs. Mallard was looking past that and looking forward to “a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely.” She didn’t feel like she was living for herself, but now that her husband was dead she felt free of his shackles of oppression. She carried herself “like a goddess of Victory.” She felt that she had overcome her husband and all the hell he had put her through. She felt like an independent woman.
The story ends with such a twist. Brently Mallard who was announced dead in the beginning of the story is actually alive. That discovery ends up killing Mrs. Mallard, which doctors claim, “she had died of heart disease—of the joy that kills.” That statement shows the ignorance of males to the life of women. Mrs. Mallard clearly did not die from overwhelming joy from seeing her husband alive, she died from her hopes of living for herself crashing right in front of her eyes. The pain had filled her heart all over again and it had killed her, because she knew she couldn’t live like that again when she was just rejoicing the liberation of misery from her husband.
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