Home Away for Home

Early in the 1900s, women were thought to stay home, to clean and take care of the children, to be domestic. “A Wagner Matinee,” by Willa Cather and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, are both stories about women who feel trapped by their husbands and are taken from their lives.

In “A Wagner Matinee” the woman, Aunt Georgiana, has come to Boston to receive a small legacy from a relative of hers that has just passed away. She stays with her nephew while in Boston. Her nephew, Clark wants to pay her back for all the years she had taken care of him. Clark takes her to a concert, like the ones that she had gone to when she was a little girl. Although Georgiana had grown up in the city, she had not gone more than 50 miles away from her home in the country for 30 years. The reason for this is because she eloped and after their marriage her husband took her away from the city and away from her family and friends, and moved to the country. After the concert is over Georgiana cries “I don’t want to go, Clark, I don’t want to go!” (21) This shows how she does not want to leave the magic of her childhood to go back to her life in the country.

In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a family gets a summer home. “A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house… Why should it be let so cheaply?” (9) The wife does not want to stay at the house and thinks the house is haunted, but her husband just laughs at the idea. John, her husband and physician, believes she not to be sick, and do not admit that she might be sick since he has no way to cure her, and feel he has failed his profession because he not able to cure the women that he loves. She is not allowed to work, and is thought to be a source of her illness. “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.” (9) Because she is not allowed to work, she feels trapped and her sickness worsens. In the Summerhouse her room is upstairs and covered in old yellow wallpaper, that she dislikes very much. “I don’t like my room one bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! But John would not hear of it.” (9) This shows how controlling her husband is, which is probably cause for her illness. Because of her controlling husband she starts to see a women trapped behind the wallpaper, but the woman is her, and symbolizes how she’s trapped by her husband.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” and “A Wagner Matinee” have similar ideas, of how the husbands control their wives life, not letting them be free taking their wives from their home to some place new, that they disliked. In “A Wagner Matinee” Georgiana is taken to the country to live, away from her family and friends. Not until 30 years later on her first trip back to the city does she realize how she misses her old life. “ I had felt some trepidation lest she might become aware of the absurdities of her attire, or might experience some painful embarrassment at stepping suddenly into the world to which she had been dead for a century”(20) This is because she has not been