Comparing 'Their Eyes Were Watching God And The Story Of An Hour'

The stories Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “The Story of an Hour,” by Kate Chopin all center around three different women and their different life experiences. Each story also tells how the lives of these three women are affected by their husbands. The narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” along with Janie and Mrs. Mallard each have different relationships with their husbands, but they each feel they are being controlled or oppressed by them. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie’s story is told through her three marriages, all three with their own problems. Janie’s first husband, Logan Killicks, controlled and verbally abused her. He tells her, “You ain’t got no particular place. It’s wherever Ah need yuh…Don’t change too many words wid me dis mawnin…” (pg 31). Logan was not the perfect husband Janie had envisioned. He wanted her to obey his every command, causing her to leave him for Joe Starks. Although great at first, Joe turned out to be just as bad, if not worse, as Logan. He forced Janie to cover up her hair, prevented her from interacting with the townspeople, and hit her for talking back to him. Tea Cake, Janie’s third and final husband,

Just as Joe isolated Janie from the other people in Eatonville, John isolates his wife from the outside world, believing it will help her get better. Her isolation causes her depression to develop into hallucinations and insomnia. She envisions a woman on her bedroom wallpaper that is trapped behind a set of bars, trying to get out. The trapped woman represents the speaker, whose husband locks her away from the rest of the world. Her husband also resorts to belittling her and treats her like a child in order to get her to obey him. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” a man trying to cure his wife’s mental illness actually causes her to become more