Compare & Contrast Mrs. Mallard, "the Story of an Hour" to Jane, "the Yellow Wallpaper"

Diverse authors use diverse strategies to catch a reader’s attention. Both Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were women ahead of their time; they wrote stories that were socially unacceptable but are now considered some of the greatest. In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” the protagonist, Mrs. Mallard, dies of a heart attack after hearing of her husband’s death. Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” with a blasphemous plot at the time: a woman, Jane, bedridden because of depression, begins to see a woman underneath the wallpaper of her rented mansion. By the end of the story, Jane believes that she is the woman under the wallpaper. In both stories, the diseased and doubted women enclose serious mental and emotional problems.

The women’s diseases are evident even from the beginning of the story.

Jane, the narrator and protagonist in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” was diagnosed by her husband and physician as having a “temporary nervous depression” (Perkins Gilman 425). She is placed in a rented mansion for a change of scenery to help her recover from her illness and is bedridden for most of her stay. Jane