Comparing Hills Like White Elephants And The Yellow Wallpaper
994 Words4 Pages
Bavneet Randhawa
English IB
Professor Diaz
10 March 2015
Draft 1B: Essay 1 Throughout most of history, women have had to fight for their equality, independence, and rights because man and the rest of society downgraded them. Making women feel somewhat out of place and vulnerable. In both the short stories, “Hills Like White Elephants” and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Hemingway and Gilman convey the female characters as subordinate towards the demanding male characters, which caused tension and restrain in their relationships.
The powerlessness of female characters is an important comparison between these two stories. In “Hills Like White Elephants” the girl, called Jig, and the American man are contemplating an abortion. In the beginning of…show more content… To exemplify, the narrator gets pleasure and feels relaxed while writing about her thoughts, but “John... hates to have [her] write a word” (Gilman, 549). “John says the very worst thing the [narrator] can do is to think about her condition” (Gilman, 548). But writing is the only way in the narrator can express her feelings and keep sane, however she is not able to write freely. Conveying that John is both controlling of her inner thoughts as well as her physical surroundings and actions. By not allowing his wife to leave the house, change rooms or express her depression, John expresses his power and domination over the narrator’s life. The narrator’s major flaws are falling for John’s words when he tells her he only wants the best for her and trusting his diagnoses because he is “a physician of high standards” (Gilman, 547). Forcing the narrator to obey John and limit her expression, which drives her towards insanity, even though she “disagrees with [his] ideas... [and] believes that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do [her] good,” (Gilman, 547). Flaws in the female characters are not the sole cause of the strained relationships in these two