Women's roles in society and culture

¶ … Setting of Two Turn of the Century Feminist Tales

The use of irony in both tales

Women today

Women's Role in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "A Story of an Hour"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short tale "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Katherine Anne Porter's short story "A Story of an Hour" both depict the constrained lives of middle-class women. The protagonist of "The Yellow Wallpaper" is driven mad when she is refused her books and the healthy aspects of her daily life as a rest cure, after the woman has given birth to her first child. The rest cure merely kindles the illness within her. In "A Story of an Hour," a woman with a bad heart is denied all of the aspects of life that make life worth living, such as travel and adventure, for fear the excitement will cause her to have a heart attack.

Ironically, the woman at the end of "A Story of an Hour" dies, when she hears the miserable shock that her overprotective husband, believed dead, is actually alive. The people around her say the young wife must have died of joy, but the reader, who is privy to her internal monologue, knows that the woman died from the shock of knowing that she had to return to the life she hoped to leave, the life of the supervised domestic sphere under her husband's thumb. The woman of the "Yellow Wallpaper," in a less obvious irony, may be depressed because she has just given birth, just as the woman of "A Story of an Hour" may actually have a weak heart, but both stories suggest that intensifying the constraints upon women, and expecting women to behave like children, merely makes the symptoms of motherhood and the physical ailments of being a childlike daughter or wife with a bad heart even worse, mentally and physically.