Story Of An Hour Feminist Analysis

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Female authors in the 19th and 20th centuries often make references to the oppression of women and how feminists of the time would try and overcome their oppression. Although the numbers of feminists in this time period were meager, they would express themselves through literature. Two prominent feminists were Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, both of the central female characters have oppression that they suffer from while using similar yet vastly different tactics in an effort to combat their oppression. Before one even begins to read “The Yellow Wallpaper”, they can infer that due to Charlotte Perkins Gilman history of “mental illnesses”…show more content…
Right after Mrs. Mallard’s sister Josephine told her of her husband Brently’s death she went to her room isolated. and stared out her window. At this point she realized how this death was a “new spring of life”. (Chopin 5) The “delicious breath of rain” along with other forms of nature such as the “patches of blue sky” which break through the clouds provide Mrs. Mallard with serenity and help enable her to realize the “benefits” of her husband’s death. (Chopin 5,6) Works of Chopin generally can be considered social commentary and in this case it definitely an example. The fact that not too long after Mrs. Mallard’s husband dies she is focusing on the benefits of this and how she is now” free, free, free” shows the extreme degree that women were oppressed to in this time period. (Chopin 10) In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the narrator’s room in the “house” is located on a high floor. The narrator does not like this; she “wanted one downstairs that opened up on the piazza and had roses all over the window”. (Gilman 25) Her husband John does not allow of this as he feels that it will worsen her condition. There is a certain level of ambiguity as to how truthful John is when he says this. In addition to wanting a room with beautiful parts of nature a part of it, the “delicious garden” fascinates her. To her account it is, “large and shady, full of box-bordered…show more content…
They simply were not looked at the same as men. Women generally did not work and stayed at home to take care of duties around the house. They were often misread and as a result would often fall into depression or insanity. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s situation precisely was that. In Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” Mrs. Mallard passes away upon seeing that her husband “had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not know that there had even been one”. (Chopin 20) Mrs. Mallard had been “afflicted with heart trouble” prior to this moment. (Chopin 1) The doctors believed that “she had died of heart disease-of joy that kills”. (Chopin 22) This displays once again how women could be misread in this age. Louise Mallard did not die from joy but from shock and despair that the freedom that she just realized she had was now gone. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman’s husband John is a doctor. This would normally mean that could hands were in charge of her case but doctors too close to the situation can often lead to negligence. Instead of listening to his wife and allowing her to work since she felt that it helped her she was “absolutely forbidden to “work” until” she was well again. (Gilman 11) Instead they giver her “phosphates or phosphites”. (Gilman 11) Since the doctors and family around her cannot read the narrator properly she falls further into a state of insanity to an
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