"The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and "The Story of an Hour," by Kate Chopin, are similar, in that both women in the two stories are subordinated by their husbands, which causes them to feel an intense desire for freedom. It is a time when women whose husbands have decent income are expected to be fragile. However, the women in the stories have different life changes and different responses to their own freedom as a result of their life changes.
             The subordination of women in "The Story of an Hour" and "The Yellow Wallpaper," in comparison one can identify that both females lived during the same era. For Gilman, in "The Yellow Wallpaper" the conventional nineteenth-century middle-class marriage, with its rigid distinction between the "domestic" functions of the female and the "active" work of the male, ensured that women remained second-class citizens. John's assumption of his own superior wisdom and maturity leads him to misjudge, patronize, and dominate his wife in the name of "helping" her. Chopin also, in the story, "The Story of an Hour" concurs with Gilman "The Yellow Wallpaper" by stating that marriage generally is oppressive. Louise, who readily admits that her husband was kind and loving, nonetheless feels joy when she got the news that he was dead. However, despite the love between husband and wife, Louise views Brently's death as a release from oppression when she exclaimed, "free, free, free!" (Chopin 13)
             Furthermore, the importance of self-expression is another similarity in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "The Story of an Hour." In "The Yellow Wallpaper," the narrator is forced to become completely passive, forbidden from exercising her mind in any way. She is constantly longing for an emotional and intellectual outlet, even going so far as keeping a journal which s...