Essay Comparing The Awakening And The Yellow Wallpaper
2250 Words9 Pages
The Inevitable Outcome of Fighting Social Norms In both “The Awakening” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” the commonplace views of women are exceedingly unacceptable by today’s standards, yet they were deemed morally appropriate by the norms of society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The treatment and attitude of men towards women was based in a de facto “derogatory” manner. Because it was typically acceptable to treat women as inferior, and for men to impose their dominance upon women, women acknowledged that this negligent treatment was ordinary and that their place in society was in the role of domestic housewives. The treatment fostered an attitude of “don’t question what you are told to do” among women, and if any independent actions or self-presumed thoughts…show more content… She remembers amusing herself with the idea of imaginary night time monsters as a child, and she enjoyed the notion that the house they have occupied is haunted. As part of her “cure,” her husband forbids her to exercise her imagination in any way. Both her intuition and her emotions resist this treatment, so in an attempt to ignore her frustration, she turns her imagination to neutral objects, like the house and the wallpaper. As the story develops, the narrator finally identifies herself with the woman trapped in the wallpaper, and she is able to see that other women are forced to creep and hide behind the domestic “patterns” of their lives, and that she herself is the one that has been trapped by society and is in need of rescue The wallpaper is an obvious allusion to the inescapable humble domestic life that ensnares the narrator, along with many other women of the Victorian Era. The narrator’s eventual insanity is a product of the repression of her imaginative power, not the expression of it. Logically, a mind that is forced to be inactive against one’s will is doomed to insanity and