The Similarity of Heroes in the Tale of the Hour and Yellow Wallpaper - Essay Example

Your Your Number 14 April 2006 Too Much Love: Similarities in “The Story of an Hour” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” When a marriage is a prison and the husband is a warden, strong women must eventually find a way to escape. Mrs. Mallard in “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and the narrator in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman are both intelligent Victorian women, but neither is allowed to publicly express herself. Instead, each woman is forced to keep her ideas bottled up inside because her husband smothers her with love and deprives her of her freedom. For the unnamed woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” this suffocation overcomes her and she escapes to the only place she can avoid John’s crushing caress: the madness of her own mind. Mrs. Mallard is allowed to finally release “the strongest impulse of her being” (Chopin 537) and when reality tries to replace the cork on her freedom, it is too much for her to bear. She dies of heartbreak. In these two stories, we see how the oppression of women under the guise of love leads to the destruction of both the love and the woman. Both characters are constrained in the very beginning by the social conventions of their time and class. Many middle class women in that time period were expected to confine themselves to the home and domestic sphere, and even then, they were not expected to be in charge of the house, having lower class servants to do the cooking, cleaning and childrearing. It was thought that true women should not exert themselves, because they were too fragile to handle any strain. So it is for the characters in these stories. They are thought to be weak. Mrs. Mallard, we learn in the first sentence, “was afflicted with heart trouble” (Chopin 536) and thus “great care” (Chopin 536) is taken with her. Her family does not believe she can handle the news of her husband’s death on her own and does even allow her the luxury of sitting alone in her room. The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” relates that her husband, John, “is very careful and loving” (Gilman 727) and John’s sister is “so careful of me” (Gilman 729). Further, her unnamed condition, which seems to be lack of stimulation, is exacerbated by a husband who belittles her with his every loving gesture. She says, “He laughs at me, of course, but one expect that in a marriage” (Gilman 725). He reduces her anger with him to a “nervous condition” (Gilman 726), dictates “a schedule prescription for each hour in the day” (Gilman 726), “hates to have [her] write a word” (Gilman 726), forbids her to have “stimulating people about” (Gilman 728), forces her to live in a nursery, and calls her “little girl” (Gilman 732). In short, because she is a woman and he is a doctor and her husband, he is allowed to treat her like a child when it seems that her true complaint is that she’s bored because he doesn’t let her do anything. John knows there is nothing wrong with his wife. She says, “he does not believe I am sick” (Gilman 726) and he “assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with” (Gilman 726) her. And yet he confines her to a room with bars in the window and makes every decision for her, particularly decisions that involve the possibility of his wife having an intellectual or social life. It seems very likely that John has deliberately produced an atmosphere in which his creative and intelligent wife will lose all those qualities that makes her an individual and become completely dependant on him. It is an acute case of the same paternal bullying that Mrs. Mallard complains of a: “powerful will bending hers” (Chopin 537) because her husband believes he has “a right to impose a private will upon” her (Chopin 537). Although she loves him, at times, she does not love him all the time, and she can’t appreciate his solicitous love as long as if results in her own desires being crushed. Both characters are obsessed with the idea of freedom. Mrs. Mallard keeps repeating the phrase, “Free! Body and soul free!” (Chopin 537) and “her fancy was running riot” (Chopin 537) with the thought of “all sorts of day that would be her own” (Chopin 537). This is a woman who, although young, feels that her entire life has been shadowed by the controlling influence of her husband. Without him in her future, she pray “that life might be long” (Chopin 537), when, with his presence, she had “only yesterday…thought with a shudder that life might be long” (Chopin 537). The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” instead projects her desire for freedom on “a woman stooping down and creeping about behind” (Gilman 731) the wallpaper who “shake[s] the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out) (Gilman 731). She sees bars confining the woman and is amazed to “think that woman gets out in the daytime!” (Gilman 735). In her mind, the insane pattern mirrors the real bars on her windows, and she sees herself trapped behind them. She pities this woman more than she is allowed to pity herself, because of course, there is nothing wrong with her and her husband takes care of her anyway. However, this strange creeping woman behind the paper is trapped in a way that wrings the narrator’s heart, and the once-weak woman can easily find the energy to work on this other woman’s behalf, to secure the freedom of a supposed other when her own freedom seems out of reach. Eventually, a clever mind forced into inactivity is required to create escape in any way it possibly can. The narrator does so by ripping all the wallpaper off, thus freeing the “woman” who is really the narrator herself. At the end of the story, without the constraints of sanity (and thus, the need to please her husband or obey his will) she wonders “if they all come out of that wall-paper as I did” (Gilman 737) and is content to “creep around as I please” (Gilman 737). She is triumphant in this freedom, crowing, “I’ve got out at last…in spite of you” (Gilman 737). In her mind, she has freed herself. Mrs. Mallard’s escape, once it is made good, is too powerful to be relinquished. Rather than succumb to her husband’s will again, she dies instantly “of heart disease—of joy that kills” (Chopin 538). In a story such as this, death is the only possible escape. Mrs. Mallard had hoped that it was her husband’s death that would set her free, but when that reality was proved false, with the knowledge that he might rule over her for a long, long time, she must take the other path, to the place where no man can ever constrain her again. In these two stories, modern readers can have a taste of a world in which the word “feminism” did not exist and women’s rights were considered a radical idea. It was not uncommon in this time period for men to control their wives and even have them committed to an asylum if they did not behave according to expectations. It seems likely that many women broke under the pressure of being treated like a child or a possession by men who had complete control of their bodies and exercised it in the name of love and family. The characters in these two stories are good portraits of the effects of patriarchal thinking. All people need freedom to be happy and sane, and no group has the right to oppress another group. Otherwise, the stories discussed become, not relics of mistakes of the past, but dreadful warnings of mistakes possible in the future. Works Cited Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature 3rd edition. Ed. Paul Lauter. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 1998. 536-8. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature 3rd edition. Ed. Paul Lauter. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 1998. 725-37. Read More