Compare and contrast "The Yellow Wallpaper" and The Awakening.

The story "The Yellow Wallpaper" and the novel The Awakening share a common theme: the subjugation of women toward the end of the nineteenth century. Both writings feature a female character that is dissatisfied with her current conditions. Part of the problem is that a patriarchal society bestows upon females roles that are as strict as they are unrealistic. According to the expectations of the time, women were second class citizens whose jobs were to be wives, mothers, homemakers, and "angels of the household." This Victorian ideal meant that specific behaviors were almost demanded of all women, equally. As such, those women who did not fit the female prototype expected of their time would have been considered outcasts, or unfit.

Such is the case with the main character of the story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. In this story, the main character (and first person narrator) is suffering from postpartum depression. In a time when the health and needs of women were of secondary importance, and greatly misunderstood, the main character depends on a treatment plan prescribed by medical professionals (at the time, mainly men) who do not understand her. As a result, she ends up in a country estate where she goes with her husband and child to do a "rest cure." 

No intellectual stimulation and very little communication cause the woman to become more and more overwhelmed within her condition. She ends up imploding, caving in, after a final nervous breakdown in which she felt that a woman was trapped in the walls of her bedroom, which were covered by the yellow wallpaper. She tears down the paper, trying to get the woman out. She does not solve her issue; she becomes a consequence of it. 

In the novel The Awakening by Kate Chopin, main character Edna Pontellier is another woman dissatisfied with her "womanly" role. She has been married for years and has had children. She is also a homemaker and enjoys a comfortable lifestyle. Still, she knows deep inside that she has never liked to be any of those things. That is what her "awakening" is about. The way that she attempts to solve her problem is by following her impulses and attempting, as best as she can, to distance herself from her family. She moves out of the household, takes in a lover, and does all the things she sees liberated women do. Then, another awakening occurs: she is still not happy.

Edna and the main character of "The Yellow Wallpaper" show us what happens when women become trapped: they either explode and take tremendous risks, or they implode and break down. This shows that the two literary pieces share in common the themes of subjugation and the unfair treatment of women.