Main Characters in The Awakening & Yellow Wallpaper

These consequences are experienced by the main characters in slightly different ways in The Awakening and "The Yellow Wallpaper," although for similar reasons. Edna, in the former story, and the unnamed wife in the latter, are each in the position of being obliged to respond to the reality of marriages that are grounded in patriarchal society. Indeed, the marriage in each story is a microcosmic reproduction of the macrocosmic cultural norms. The response of each wife in the case has the effect of erasing her presence from both marriage and culture, but the shape that each response assumes shows how differently configured such erasure can be.

At one level, the character of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening describes the intensely subjective assertion of a right to a new (or anyway distinctive) so

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omething that moral integrity compels, an active embrace of what might be called the unconflicted moral state of solitary splendor: "The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. . . . [W]hen . . . there beside the sea, absolutely alone, she . . . felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known" (Chopin 108-9). Charlotte Perkins Gilman appears to have understood the extent to which social reality informs women's psychic condition in a society that disempowers and devalues them. In an 1899 excerpt from Women in Economics included with the Norton critical edition of The Awakening, she cites the "false position of woman" in domestic society, deploring especially structures of domestic experience in which a husband has "whole human creature consecrated to his direct personal service, to pleasing and satisfying him in every way possible . . . [which] has kept man selfish beyond the degree incidental to our stage of social growth" (Gilman 153-4). Gilman's commentary does not deal specifically with The Awakening; however, it is consistent with Edna's experience of domestic life. Equally, Gilman's "The
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1853
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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