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Comparing Two Literary Classics

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Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour” and Charlotte Perkins Stetsons’ “The Yellow Wallpaper” are two short stories of women who are facing an emotional unstableness, both due to their husbands. “The Story of an Hour” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” run side by side because they have the same point of view. Both main characters in these stories are searching for freedom and resentment from their husbands. Although they are very different, these short stories are similar in the sense that they are both told in the time period of the eighteen hundreds. In this era, women did not have a voice at all and men were socially dominant. The main character in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is undergoing an illness of postpartum depression and her husband John is a doctor who is not considerate of her feelings. John and his ill wife live in a house where she does not feel comfortable. Due to this, she becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper on the walls and exceeds to imagine things beyond the wallpaper. John demands for her to rest as much as possible, and choses a dull room for them to live in. Louise, the protagonist in “Story of an Hour”, suffers greatly from heart conditions but soon feels free after the news of her husband dying. Even though both of their marriages may contain some sort of devotedness, they lack more detachment due to the control of their husbands. The author portrays in “The Yellow Wallpaper” that the husband babies his wife by using a metaphor to compare her to a goose. “Then he took me in his arms and called me a blessed little goose, and said he would go down to the cellar if I wished, and have it whitewashed into the bargain” (Lynch, 56). This disconnection of love is also shown in “Story of an Hour” when the author uses a different literary element to paint a picture. Imagery is a literary element that is used to give a reader a type of mental image. “Imagery helps the reader to visualize

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