Stories on Gender and Society - Essay Example

These three ‘Ks’ involved ‘kitchen, kids and kin’. Women had to care of house, children and family. The most intolerable thing was constant observations and control to not permit any deviations from women’s side. The most suffering group of females was women of middle class society as they could not protect their freedom due to their position or money. The horrid Cult mostly influenced women’s self-determination, the lack of which caused male-female inequality in family, social and professional spheres.

Therefore, husbands decided what was the best for wives, society justified women’s morality and employers gave women lower positions and less salary. This paper will discuss the three stories where all these three spheres heavily injured women’s self-determination but all the three heroines attempted to get rid of the Cult norms and to free themselves. The stories to be discussed are: ‘The Yellow Wall Paper’ by Charlotte Gilman, ‘A Rose for Emily’ by William Faulkner and ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ by Ernest Hemingway.

‘The Yellow Wall Paper’ is a story of ‘ill-nervous’ woman whose husband is a doctor and he is quite confident in what treatment is the best for his wife: ‘He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.’ (chapter I). The heroine’s freedom is restricted by an old house room furnished by the yellow wall papers. Her husband even refuses her to change the room when she hates these yellow wall papers: ‘[then]he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down cellar, if I wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain.

’ (chapter I) He even forbids her to write although writing is her passion: ‘There comes John, and I must put this away,—he hates to have me write a word.’ (chapter I) Having thrown into loneliness and idleness in the yellow papered room the woman begins hating her husband’s ‘good care’ and