"The Yellow Wallpaper" and "The Awakening"


"The Yellow Wallpaper" is a short story from a woman's perspective on the vacation she is taking as her husband/physician thinks she is too "stressed". The cause of this stress is her newborn child, who she doesn't like to hold because it, more or less freaks her out. And so she is taken out to the country and forced to stay in a place she doesn't like and remains with in a room she cannot stand. Particularly its yellow wallpaper. The room it's self was supposed to be a room for children, despite what appear to be shackles on the walls and bars in the windows, making the room it's self more of a prison, if not in reality an institution. And the yellow wallpaper drives her to the point of insanity, where she sees a woman living in the wallpaper and she in fact begins to crept around on the floor, and the man we presume to be her husband passes out on the floor.


"The Yellow Wallpaper" and "The Awakening" both take on the role of motherhood in the nineteenth century. Wives were expected to have children and tend to their every need. In "The Awakening" Edna doesn't hate her children, but she prefers it when they aren't around and she doesn't value them over herself. The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" doesn't even feel comfortable holding her child, preferring others to tend to it. It is interesting to note that both woman feel guilt over this, which is heightened by women they are close to who take on the domestic role for women with ease. This is for Edna, her friend Adele, and to the narrator it is John's sister, Jennie.


Both of the women are considered to be wrong. Women at the time were supposed to live for their children and husband, and neither of them are capable or satisfied doing so. For the narrator, this meant being sent to an asylum to try and correct her ways and fix her "slight hysterical tendencies." This goes horribly awry and she becomes obsessed with the wallpaper, there by removing herself from society and "freeing" herself from the constraints that were placed on women. Edna tries to become attune to her emotions and find her place in society, who she wants to be and who she wants to be with. But she is pulled back and forth and cannot decide to be completely independent or to accept her life as it is. And she eventually is "freed" through her death, in which she is alone and in peace, letting the waves take her.


Though death or insanity may not be the first response when one expresses their desires to be free of a society that expects them to conform to a certain lifestyle. Yet both woman, are at peace and accept things the way they are at last in their final moments. To them, their children and husbands no longer matter, and neither do the opinions of society. Both these stories show woman authors showing their frustration in the society they live in and their attempt to show society what it is that they are in reality forced to give up.