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Compare And Contrast The Yellow Wallpaper And Half The Sky

Decent Essays

Both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Half the Sky imply women should be freed from oppression and inequality. However, each text approaches the problem of oppression in a different way. While both “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Half the Sky underscore how women are constrained physically and emotionally within a male-dominated society, the stories diverge in how they understand this oppression. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator’s relationship to her bedroom’s wallpaper and her descent into mental illness symbolize the social danger of misogyny, even if it is well intended. But in Half the Sky gender inequality is expressed through actual cases of physical and sexual violence. In these nonfiction stories the YW is fiction??, the writers show that, despite extreme brutality and violence, women in the developing the YW is in the “developed” world--though it takes place in the past. world are capable of living a fulfilling and productive life. While both texts agree that women should be free, the writers differ in how they express the experience of oppression and the reasons it should be ended.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” is written from the perspective of a woman who is diagnosed by her physician-husband as having “a slight hysterical tendency.” The story is from her first-person perspective of this “temporary nervous depression.” Her husband John loves her, but is condescending: “He is very careful and loving and hardly lets me stir without special direction” (648). He calls her

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