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Story Of An Hour Female Freedom Essay

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Female Freedom Like a bird in a cage, a controlling relationship can make a women feel trapped in an inescapable abyss. The rigors from a controlling, male-dominant relationship can absolutely eat away at a women's will-power to take action against it. Both of these stories were caught in the midst of the Progressive Era. A time when women suffered persecution just because of their gender. Each story embodies the realm of what it’s like to be confined, ridiculed, and forced to contravene from society. Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” both emphasize the epitome of what it’s like to be confined and in a controlling marriage, the attempt to become free, and the realization of self morals …show more content…

The constant entrapment the women suffered in the stories prolonged their happiness to the point where they had enough. The satisfaction Mrs. Mallard felt in “The Story of an Hour” was only applicable when her husband was pronounced dead for the short hour. The physiological problems were evident at the start of the story when we see Mrs. Mallard’s reaction to her husband’s death. She apparently already had heart troubles so the shock she felt from her husband's reappearance did not coincide. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator obviously is suffering from an illness known as nervous depression. The constant blockage from society was detrimental to her health and supplied her with physiological problems as well. For her to go from completely fine to saying the color of the wallpaper “...slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you” can only be blamed on mental problems. The quest for both ladies to gain their freedom was given up on as both husbands in the story weren’t going to allow this. Mental ailments proved to be remotely different from the physical problems the women were

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