Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman Essay

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The society of the time didn't support women's intellectual activities and hence doctors denied their mentally ill patients the right to enjoy something other than domestic chores. This only compounded the problem and hence Gilman decided to speak against such medical approaches. "Charlotte Perkins Gilman placed the rest cure in the cultural context of late nineteenth century. The story was a metaphor for the lives of middle-class women trapped in other people's expectations;…" (Patarca-Montero, p. 4)

Gilman readily spoke against isolation and its decaying effect on human mind and in a way that is exactly what Jack London says in his story, "To build a fire." In this story, a man decides to travel alone in sub-zero temperature to meet his friends after ignoring the advice that it was not safe to travel alone. The word "alone" is important here because it somehow seems that the protagonist believed that he could have survived the weather if he had not been alone. The fact that the weather couldn't have worked for anyone is completely ignored by the man as he focuses on his utter loneliness. He knows there is no man to help him out and that survival on one's own is not possible especially when in the face of hostile natural forces. "The old-timer had been very serious in laying down the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below.

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The protagonists in both stories are faced with a herculean task. One has to overcome brutal weather to reach a place of safety, and the other has to fight against the doctors when she herself knows better. The man is rather smug and it is his stupidity that kills him because he had good advice of friends but decided to ignore it only to face death in the end. "There is a grim poetic justice in the fact that this coldly practical man literally freezes to death because he has committed the fatal blunder not only of spurning companionship but also of scorning the old timer's wisdom."(Labor, p. xxi) the woman on the other hand is wiser and intellectually aware of her condition but she is unfortunately surrounded by unwise people who fail to listen to her.

The two important themes in the story are thus "hostile nature" and "aloneness." In case of the Yellow Wallpaper, the two essential themes are "unwise medical community" and "isolation." When compared and contrasted, these stories are essentially about survival in the face of antagonistic forces. Both protagonists fail to survive but in different ways. While the man dies after struggling for hours to build a fire, the mentally ill woman's condition worsens to the point of complete lunacy......

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