Institution of Marriage

In the story “The Yellow Wallpaper”, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, I will discuss how women were oppressed by the institution of marriage in the nineteenth century while making comparative references to “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin. Women were treated as second class citizens during the 1800’s, which under rule of their husband weren’t allowed to be a person of their own, but live in the shadow of their husband. The narrator in “The yellow Wallpaper” is diagnosed with a nervous disorder by her husband John and her brother, whom are both doctors, and given a resting cure. Living up to the ideals of nineteenth century women, the narrator is expected to be passive, forbidden to exercise her mind and ideas, and prohibited to write. She keeps a secret diary where she writes her thoughts and opinions, since she is unable to speak her mind. She is sent to live in a colonial mansion, and is to be taken care of by a nanny in the upstairs room which used to be a child’s nursery with bars on the windows and a bed that is nailed down. There is also strange colored stripped-off yellow wallpaper surrounding the room. Oppressed women were misjudged, dominated and patronized by their husbands. John patronizes and belittles his wife by talking to her as if she were a child and not his equal. The narrator soon becomes obsessed with the peeling yellow wallpaper. She states, “This wallpaper has a kind of sub-pattern in a different shade, a particularly irritating one. But in the places where it isn’t faded and where the sun is just so-I can see a strange, provoking, formless sort of figure that

"seems to skulk about behind that silly and conspicuous front design” (306). The narrator becomes one with the paper surrounding her room and starts to identify with it; she begins to abandon her husband and her care taker since they don’t listen to her and starts to focus on only the paper. She waits until everyone in the house is asleep at night and begins to creep around the room. She believes that there are oppressed woman, just like herself behind the wallpaper, and it is like the bars of a cage forbidding them to escape. The wallpaper is a symbol of the domestic lift that traps women. The narrator states, “Sometimes I think there are great women behind. Then in the very bright spots she keeps still, and in the very shady spots she just takes hold of the bars and shakes them hard. And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern-it strangles so” (311).She wants to continue to peel off the paper in order to free the women trapped inside, while at the same time free herself from the world in which she is trapped and only she can see. In “The Story of an Hour” Louise is an oppressed woman living in her husband’s footsteps, when she learns that her husband is on the deceased list at work she feels a sense of newfound freedom and joy. She begins the recognition of selfhood and no longer feels as though she is owned and dominated by a man. After learning of her awakening she states, “Free, free, fee” (124). The women in both of these stories begin to feel free from the dominance and constraints of marriage when they realize their possession of self assertion. By abandoning their

husbands, both of the women in these stories are given a chance to live without the burdens that have oppressed them in the institution of marriage. By relating the two women characters in the stories, “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Story of an Hour” it becomes clear to the reader that women were oppressed by their husbands during this time period because of the institution of marriage and the strict laws their husbands placed on them. Women lacked self-independence and started to go mad in search of their own identity, which led to the diagnosis of hysteria in women during the nineteenth century. This is why we frequently see women writers using the theme of the oppression of women during this time period; their writing was the only way to repress their feelings and at the same time express themselves as individuals.