The Prison Called Marriage - Essay Example

They argue that marriage is an institution of imprisonment for the protagonists, who lived in similar settings and suffered from intense gender inequality and the absence of personhood. “Yellow” and “Hour” share similarities in the plot because the protagonists are both married, lost their personhood as wives, and for the climax of their stories, attained freedom through death. The narrator of “Yellow” is married to John, a notable physician in their community, while Mrs. Mallard is married to Brent.

Initially, they seem to be happy with their marriages, until they realized that love cannot exist in a marriage between a superior and a slave. Louise reflects on her marriage and acknowledges that she does not love him: “And yet she had loved him--sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter!” (Chopin, 1894). It no longer mattered to her if she loved him, because now she can love herself. John’s wife has not yet come into terms of her true feelings for her husband, when she says: “It is so hard to talk with John about my case, because he is so wise, and because he loves me so” (Gilman, 1899).

This statement reveals that his love demands that his wife yields to him because he is a man and more intelligent than her. Throughout the story, she never says she loves her husband. For how can a man who looks down on his wife be loved by the latter? Also, because of marriage, these women lost their personhood. As wives, they are wives and nothing else. Mrs. Mallard’s first name is not mentioned until the end, while the narrator of “Yellow” has no first name at all. These nameless women signify that they are properties of their husbands.

They have no sense of self because the “I” is subjugated in marriage. Furthermore, these short stories have the same climax, because they both end in freedom through death. Louise has prepared herself to embrace a new identity as a free woman. When she sees her husband once more, she dies rather than to continue living as an imprisoned wife. John’s wife does not die, but she goes insane. Her insanity kills her identity as a wife, and in another sense, she is free too like Louise. “Yellow” and “Hour” possess the same storyline of unhappy married women, who finally freed themselves from their bondage.

Aside from having the same plots, these stories have similar settings, where the characters live in the late nineteenth century are confined in their houses. Chopin and Gilman depict through these stories that the nineteenth century is cruel to women. As women, these authors know what it feels to be a woman and to be a wife, and both are statuses that do not give access to the same rights and liberties as men and husbands. The narrator of “Yellow” stays in a temporary vacation house, but it becomes her house nevertheless. Mrs. Mallard achieves her freedom and prepares for her destiny inside her house.

In fact, she stays in her bedroom all the time, which signifies that her body and identity are both owned by her husband. No wonder then that when she sits on a chair in her room, she feels a sense of “…physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul” (Chopin, 1894). John’s wife also lives her life almost inside her bedroom. She stays there majority of the time because her husband