Marital Ties and Chains 19th Century Marriage

Marital Ties and Chains

19th century marriage as portrayed in Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper"

Both Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" explore the limited autonomy of women within the institution of marriage. The stories paint a bleak, chilling portrait of the ways in which the institution of marriage can stifle individual expression. Mrs. Mallard and the unnamed narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" feel constrained by marriage but society refuses to acknowledge their pain, frustration, and suffering. Only through sickness can women express their feelings, and even then society often misreads female psychological distress as a physical malady.

In "The Story of an Hour," the main character Mrs. Mallard believes that her husband has been killed in a freak train accident. Rather than the misery she might be expected to feel, Mrs. Mallard instead has a sense of overwhelming joy and freedom. "When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: 'free, free, free!'" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes." The vacant sense of fear and the dread that her life means nothing if she is not married ebbs away quickly. For the first time in her life, Mrs. Mallard is under no one's control. However, Mrs. Mallard is alleged to have a weak heart, and when she sees her husband -- alive -- again, she falls down dead. Ironically, it is said that she has died of joy, even though the reader, because he or she has been privy to Mrs. Mallard's inner state of consciousness, knows that she has died from the shock of horror that she is once again in marital chains. However, no one is able to see Mrs. Mallard's misery, because society is so wedded to the idea that a women's only joy in life is her husband. Mrs. Mallard is assumed to welcome the fact the law renders herself entirely dependent upon her husband.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman portrays a narrator who has been denied all mental and physical stimulation by her physician-husband. Much as Mrs. Mallard's husband and other relatives treat her like a child, the narrator is infantilized and her complaints of boredom are ignored. The so-called rest cure only serves to drive her deeper into her depression, which Gilman insinuates occurred after the birth of her child. Contrary to the commonly-held assumption that women are too feeble to sustain serious 'brain work,' the narrator eventually deteriorates into complete insanity, as the result of her husband's prescription of total rest. The inability of males to acknowledge female needs either in their role as husbands or as medical authorities is embodied in the text. The narrator strives to 'free' the woman behind the yellow wallpaper, a woman who is actually an extension of the narrator's sublimated longing for independence: "I've got out at last…in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!"