The Yellow Wallpaper And A Doll's House Essay

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From the old ages to present day, there has always been a division between men and women. Back then it seems the wives were expected to take care of the house, and the husbands were always the dominant one of the relationship. The man appears to always be right while the woman needs to appreciate the man because he provides for the household. Both Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Henry Isben’s play “A Doll’s House” portray how women struggle in marriages. Nora Helmer, the protagonist from “A Doll’s House,” first sounds to be a playful, childish woman who does not know much of the outside world, but secretly, she does. The unnamed narrator from “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a very imaginative writer who is being …show more content…
A theme in this story would be that women feel trapped in their marriage. In the story, the yellow wallpaper is a significant symbol that supports the theme. After staring at the yellow wallpaper for hours she sees a figure of a woman that is trapped in the pattern. The woman is symbolically the narrator that is trapped in the yellow wallpaper which stands for her marriage. At the end of the story the narrator finds herself ripping off the wallpaper so John could not put her back in and she utters, “‘I've got out at last,’… ‘ And I have pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!’” Johns faints and the narrator creeps over him many times to “freedom”. She lost herself at the end but is free from her …show more content…
Nora does not realize that she is trapped in her marriage until the end of the play. At the end Torvald reads what Nora has been hiding from him and he says unforgivable things to Nora. She realizes then that she had never had a serious conversation in her marriage until the day she left. She decides that she wants to leave Torvald to go find herself because she was trapped in a marriage all her life and she admits, “‘ I must be quite alone, if I am to understand myself and everything about me.’” Nora leaves her marriage to go find herself unlike the narrator who leaves but ends up losing her self in the

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