Essay On Women In The Yellow Wallpaper And Little Red Cap

In society, one sees the pattern of women being shown and treated as weaker than their male counterparts. This can be portrayed in literature with women being depicted as feeble and powerless, while men are seen in the opposite view as powerful and capable. This stereotype is depicted in both Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s “Little Red Cap” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, which portray the thought of females not being able to help themselves without the assistance of a man. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s “Little Red Cap” is a classic example of an innocent girl needing to be saved. Little Red Cap goes into the woods to deliver baked goods and wine to her sick, frail grandmother. When she enters the woods the wolf approaches her, however, she is naively unaware of the danger he presents and walks with him for a while. Little Red Cap then steers off the path when the wolf easily tricks her, saying “Little Red Cap, just look at the beautiful flowers that are all around us? Why don’t you go and take a look?” (621 B) and she conjures up the idea …show more content…
As she stays in a vacation house with her husband for the summer, the narrator is suffering from what readers can infer is postpartum depression after she has given birth to her son. Her husband John doubles as her doctor and sees the illness as a “slight hysterical tendency” (780 M) which, at the time, physicians related to the stereotype of women being typically too emotional. John has his wife on a resting cure to get better, forbidding her to write or have any excitement at all, which is what she really wants. The narrator is out-powered by her husband, as he discredits what she believes will help her get better. This method only makes her depression worse due to the fact that being cooped up in the house all day is what makes her focus on the wallpaper so much, pushing her to the