The Yellow Wallpaper and the Awakening Comparison

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, published in 1899, is a semi-autobiographical short story depicting a young woman’s struggle with depression that is virtually untreated and her subsequent descent into madness. Although the story is centered on the protagonist’s obsessive description of the yellow wallpaper and her neurosis, the story serves a higher purpose as a testament to the feminist struggle and their efforts to break out of their domestic prison. With reference to the works of Janice Haney-Peritz’s, “Monumental Feminism and Literature’s

  “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a symbolic tale of one woman’s struggle to break free from her mental prison.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman shows the reader how quickly insanity takes hold when a person is taken out of context and completely isolated from the rest of the world.  The narrator is a depressed woman who cannot handle being alone and retreats into her own delusions as opposed to accepting her reality.  This mental prison is a symbol for the actual repression of women’s rights in society and we see the consequences when a woman tries to free herself from this social slavery.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” a short story about a mentally ill women,written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman at age 32, in 1892 is a story with a hidden meaning and many truths. Charlotte Perkins Gilman coincidentally also had a mental illness and developed cancer leading her to kill herself in the sixties. The story begins with Jane, the mentally ill woman who feels a bit distressed, and although both of the well respected men in her life are physicians she is put simply on a “rest cure”. This rest cure as well as many symbols such as the Yellow Wallpaper, her journal, and her inevitable breakdown are prime examples of the typical life of a woman in this time period and their suppressed lives that they lived even with something as serious as a

Kate Chopin’s the most well-known work The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” both initially published in 1899, present astoundingly analogous stories of the role of women in society. Both texts are narrated from the point of view of a female protagonist who breaks away from the restraining conventions of a male-ruled society before eventually emancipating through separation from the thinking world, via suicide in The Awakening and insanity in “The Yellow Wall-Paper.” Some would argue that the narrators are unreliable and the stories are misrepresented simply because

Most women in America nowadays are lucky enough to consider themselves to be an independent individual, but females were not always guaranteed their freedoms. Throughout the early 1900’s, authors would characterize husbands to be controlling figures. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins demonstrates just how possessive the husband is to his wife in their marriage. This short story shows just how miserable the woman is to be in a marriage with John because John, thinks it would be best that his wife is isolated to get over her postpartum depression.“The Yellow Wallpaper” demonstrates how a male dominated society leads to the woman not being their own individual by using characterization, narrator perspective, and conflict between women and society.

Mitchell’s treatment of the typical female seeking his world famous rest cure. Wagner-Martin states that the rest cure "depended upon seclusion, massage, immobility, and overfeeding; . . . [it] had at its root complete mental inactivity" (982). Carol Parley Kessler, in her essay on Gilman’s life, quotes Dr. Mitchell’s prescription to Gilman as, "never touch pen, brush, or pencil" (Kessler 158). Gilman subjects her narrator to the same prescription. You can tell from the story that the narrator wants to write and that she thinks that being allowed to do so would help her mental and emotional condition. She says, "I think . . . it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me" (Gilman 81).

The structure of the text, particularly evident in the author’s interactions with her husband, reveals the binary opposition between the façade of a middle-class woman living under the societal parameters of the Cult of Domesticity and the underlying suffering and dehumanization intrinsic to marriage and womanhood during the nineteenth century. While readers recognize the story for its troubling description of the way in which the yellow wallpaper morphs into a representation of the narrator’s insanity, the most interesting and telling component of the story lies apart from the wallpaper. “The Yellow Wallpaper” outwardly tells the story of a woman struggling with post-partum depression, but Charlotte Perkins Gilman snakes expressions of the true inequality faced within the daily lives of nineteenth century women throughout the story. Although the climax certainly surrounds the narrator’s overpowering obsession with the yellow wallpaper that covers the room to which her husband banished her for the summer, the moments that do not specifically concern the wallpaper or the narrator’s mania divulge a deeper and more powerful understanding of the torturous meaning of womanhood.

In "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the protagonist symbolizes the effect of the oppression of women in society in the Nineteenth Century. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the author reveals the narrator is torn between hate and love, but emotion is difficult to determine. The effects are produced by the use of complex themes used in the story, which assisted her oppression and reflected on her self-expression.

The Yellow Wallpaper is about a woman who has just had a baby and is very depressed afterwards. Her husband noticing that she isn’t herself packs up and moves them all to the country where she is isolated from her friends and family, but the only person that is there with them is the brother’s sister. Her husband keeps her locked in a room where the only thing she fixates on is the wallpaper and believes that someone is trapped inside. The Awakening is about a woman Edna Pontellier who has gone away to the Grand Isle with her family for vacation and while there she finds a new form of freedom. Edna is not happy with the life she has which causes her to be very depressed so when she goes back home to New Orleans she makes some serious changes

In both “The Awakening” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” the views of women are exceedingly unacceptable by today’s standards, yet they were deemed morally appropriate by the norms of society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Example. The treatment and attitude of men towards women was frequently done so in a derogatory manner, regardless of the intention because it was typically acceptable to treat women as inferior and for men to impose their dominance upon women. Often times this caused women to mindlessly accept that this lousy treatment was ordinary and that their sole place in society was in the role of domestic housewives. The ways that the women in both the pieces of literature resisted and rebelled against these conventions were remarkably self-destructive and used as desperate remedies. Both the authors were similarly trying allude to that the fact that regardless of the protagonists’ attempts to alleviate their situation, they failed to take into account the fact that their problems stemmed from society’s inherent mindset of essentially treating women like second rate citizens, and not from their husbands specifically. This may have been a broader message to females in society at the time in order to shed light on the reality of their situation, and to awake them from their illusions that it was acceptable to be treated as children. Although both

Topics of great social impact have been dealt with in many different ways and in many different mediums. Beginning with the first women’s movement in the 1850’s, the role of women in society has been constantly written about, protested, and debated. Two women writers who have had the most impact in the on-going women’s movement are Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The Awakening and The Yellow Wallpaper are two of feminist literature’s cornerstones and have become prolific parts of American literature. Themes of entrapment by social dictates, circumstance, and the desire for personal independence reside within each work and bond the two together.

(Overview of the main characters) All of the characters are different in some way. Our female narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” was mentally ill and also suffered from depression. She was a married woman who loved to write. Her conflict was a woman that she saw in the yellow wallpaper whom was behind bars; she saw herself as if she was that woman. She wanted to be free from her husband and from the yellow room. On the other hand, “The Awakening” was a story about Edna who is our main character. Edna is married to a wealthy man; a man that treats her as if she was some kind of possession. Edna likes to paint, and she sees painting as some kind of freedom. Her conflict was most of the men that surrounded her; as time passed, she learned how to use this men for her own needs. At the end of the story she commits suicide.

There is a certain ignorance required to see the world and matters in it in terms of “this or that;” either black or white, either wives and mothers or social exiles. In the nineteenth century, most everyone was blinded to any but two possibilities in respect to women 's role in society. In The Awakening and The Yellow Wallpaper, the two main characters are women who have begun to see a spectrum unimaginable to those around them. Unfortunately, because the world remains engrossed in black and white, any additional hues, Edna Pontellier and the narrator of the Yellow Wall paper, become lost - not only to society but also to themselves. Each supporting character in these novels represent a larger part of the effects of this limited

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-paper” serves as a perfect example of how women are treated in the 19th century. The distracting details both surrounding and filling the new house that the main character and her husband move into haunt her. Throughout the story, the main character, as she observes the house while in isolation, notices the true meaning in life, specifically for women. Gilman’s piece unveils the unfortunate requirements that women must meet in order to become accepted into society. The imagery and description of the house mentioned in “The Yellow Wall-paper” holds a much more symbolized sense reassuring the main character about women’s roles in life, according to humanity.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening both presents the strikingly similar stories. Both the stories presents the plight of women in the society. Both the protagonist of the story experiences the same sort of oppression in the hands of conventional frame work of society. Gilman and Kate Chopin both fight against the society through their portrayal of characters. The unnamed narrator fights against the mental independence whereas Edna fights for the physical independence. They both are trying to detach themselves from the societal boundaries imposed on them. The frustration of them from this male-dominated society actually results in madness.