Breakout: Women’s Fight from Confinement
Revolting against the notion of what a “woman” was expected to be, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin created female protagonists that caused a quite stir over a century ago and still prove to be powerful symbols today. Their chains of imprisonment may have been manifested in different ways, but their longing for freedom deeply resonates within both of the women. In Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” readers are given a window through which they can view the stifling oppression of two women and the metaphorical shackles fueled by the power of gender norms within their respective relationships. These short stories serve as both depictions of the struggle from confinement that women endured throughout this era and as relevant pieces of feminist fiction illustrating how a male-dominated society can shape and strangle a woman’s longing for freedom and movement throughout the world.
In Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” readers are introduced to the notion of the “rest cure” as treatment to mental illness, one that serves as a metaphor for female oppression but also as a push back to the actual remedy once used. The narrator, a woman with a name that is never revealed, has been placed within the confines of a yellow-wallpapered room left to wallow in her post-partum depression, to which the patriarchal world that controls her cannot begin to understand, let alone cure. Instead, her husband John, a doctor, believes he knows best by entrapping her inside the four walls, keeping her safe from the outside world without the realization that this action is furthering her ailment. The story seeks to explore, in Grace and Bergshoeff’s words, “the loss of self through traumatic encounter with male power-games” (79).
It is an easy metaphor to understand by today’s standard, but it was a very real representation of how this male-centered dominance was framing the world. Because men could not begin to truly comprehend what post-partum depression was or felt like, the woman was rendered insane and diagnosed with “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman 551). No one was actually listening to what this woman was saying in her explanation of how she was feeling. There was the presupposition, instead, that a man knows what is best for her, although “he is incapable of knowing how to deal with her problem and is unsympathetic to her needs” (Grace & Bergshoeff 79). Despite the fact that Gilman’s protagonist does not believe the rest will help her, John restricts her to only viewing the yellow wallpaper from the bedroom and eventually takes away her one outlet – her journal. Because of this torturous confinement with no respite, she begins to withdraw into her illness, succumbing to her irrational thoughts, obsessions, and visions.
The yellow wallpaper becomes the symbol for the theme of the story because there are so many representations that it holds. As a symbol for her own life, she is utterly trapped within the walls of the room, but it also becomes a “disguise as an acceptable feminine topic (interest in décor)” (Treichler 62). Society, including her sister-in-law Jennie and her husband are on the outside demanding appropriate “womanly” behavior. For example, Jennie’s presence serves as the prime example of what a woman should be, by taking on the traditional duties of a housewife, and creates more guilt around the narrator’s inability to act as such. The stronger the shackles become, the more her illness progresses. Eventually, the narrator sparks the idea to strip the walls of its yellow to free the woman she keeps seeing behind the paper; with this action comes a sense of freedom within her – seeing herself as the one imprisoned and not just an illusion her mind has created out of boredom or sickness.
Much like Gilman’s protagonist, in Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” Mrs. Mallard is not seen as valuable on her own. Instead, her worth comes from her husband—another popular ideal of the era in which these stories were written. Josephine, her sister, and Richards, her husband’s friend, tread lightly when expressing the news of Mrs. Mallard’s husband’s passing and watch as she becomes inconsolable. Eventually, Mrs. Mallard withdraws to her bedroom, where she comes to a new realization—one of freedom. Without her husband, she has the ability to roam the streets and explore on her own terms, which is explained in the quote, “There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself” (Chopin 447).
Although there is some debate as to why Chopin chose to give Mrs. Mallard a heart condition, one theory is that it shows readers the wear and tear that total domination of another human being can cause. Not only can oppression affect someone mentally, but the confinement of a person’s individual identity can manifest in physical ways as well. In fact, “until her moment of illumination, Mrs. Mallard’s emotions have been stifled and suppressed to fit the mold of hollow conventions” (Jamil 216). By the time the truth comes out and she finds out her husband is actually alive, she has had an hour to revel in her awakening, “which enables her to live the last moments of her life with an acute consciousness of life’s immeasurable beauty” (Jamil 215). Her joyous moments of freedom being stolen away so quickly upon the news of her husband’s survival proves to be too strong of an emotion for her battered heart to bear. This symbolism is often misunderstood by others, both the characters in the story but also to some readers, who assume she died of overwhelming joy. My conclusion was that the happiness she did have was from the sense of freedom she felt during those moments in her bedroom, as the narrator notes, “She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial” (Chopin 447).
These female characters were both held under societal conditions and broke out of their prisons by drastic measures, and their only choices to surpass the mold given to them was insanity or death. They had patronizing husbands and were deemed insufficient due to their female quality. Their internal diagnoses (the mental illness and heart disease) were nothing more than reflections of the external social forces being pressed upon their lives, ultimately taking over their autonomy and giving them no choice in forging their own paths. Each of these women had a moment of liberation, but neither story ended in an archetypal “happily ever after.”
Feeling confined is not conducive to a fulfilling life. These women felt entrapment in both similar and different ways. The theme of oppression in both stories was vocal and woven throughout both texts, and the longing for freedom of self is ever-present. Both women were given a sickness, almost as if a part of themselves became tarnished by society’s constant pull and constraint. That notion is still relevant in the present time. The censorship, the preconceived notions, and even the expectation of a well-crafted life, although different in definition because of new media and historical progression, still plague women who constantly feel the overwhelming chokehold of the patriarchy. The “Me Too” movement, public conversation about equal pay and representation, and transgressing past the gender roles that have been set in place for centuries are all examples of the relevance that these texts still hold in 2018.