Comparison Essay Example: "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "A Room of One's Own"

“The Yellow Wallpaper”, written by Charlotte Perkins Stetson, and“A Room of One’s Own”, written by Virginia Woolf, are both literature stories written in the modern literature area. In short description, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, is a short story about a woman with melancholia that gradually goes insane overtime in a room with the disgusting yellow wallpaper. One of the messages in that story is the issues of mental health and treatment women had to face back in the 19th century. 

In "A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia Woolf shows her reasoning through fictional descriptions of why a woman should have a room of her own. One of her messages in her fiction writing was that women should have a room of their own for their thoughts and ideas for themselves. Although both of these messages seem different in many ways, there are also similarities between them along with other messages within these works in literature.  Similarities in the message between the two stories both involve the issues of social norms in which men had authority over women. During the story in, “The Yellow Wallpaper” the narrator is under these conditions by her husband based on her disease, melancholia. Melancholia back then was another word for depression or a long period of sadness and/or loneliness. Their treatment of Melancholia back then was to be in isolation from the world, given plenty of rest, and no form of writing whatsoever. All of these rules were forced upon the narrator by her husband, John. John would always make sure he fed her, got rest, stayed in the room that she despised, and made sure her wife didn’t write in shape or form, even though he failed at that part. John made sure to implement these treatments even if she didn’t agree with him.  Even with such treatment and how inhuman it was to do, the narrator goes along with it because of the amount of control and power that the husband has over her. This form of power was set up by the social norm during the 19th century, where the husband was the man that took care of the woman. Additionally, the husband was also the narrator’s doctor making some of these treatments a little more reasonable compared to a man who isn’t a doctor. This would be fine if it wasn’t for the fact that her husband was a control freak in the book, he forced her to be in this room, doing all the things to get rid of melancholia, and stopping her from writing. His control-freak behavior even gets to the point where the narrator is terrified of her husband, afraid of getting him mad and apologizing to him later. During these treatments we see the narrator conflicted within herself upon her thoughts and her husband’s “reasoning”. Some of these were convincing herself that this is normal as a married couple, other examples are her believing that her husband is right and that she is going insane. This not only sets her to go insane but also shows the situation that women were in back then having no voice or anything to stand up against men. For “A Room of One’s Own”, Virginia’s message relies on the inequality between men and women. Virginia shows this through her thoughts on how ludicrous the social norms between the two genders are. In her novel, Virginia asked why there are uneven social norms for women, and why don’t they have the same opportunities, payment, and education as men. She proves her point by creating a character for the audience to see through named Mary. Throughout the whole novel, the reader gets to see the perspective of Mary and her thoughts, Virginia Woolf's thoughts. In the novel, the character has been constantly kicked out of the male-only university for being a woman, showing the unequal treatment of education women are getting based on this restriction. Later on, Mary then describes if Shakespeare had a sister, Judith, as if she had a life where she could have a future dedicated to writing. She then illustrates all the restrictions that Judith would have because she was a woman, no form of education meaning not knowing how to write leading to not expressing her thoughts and creativity, to finally not showing her creation to the world where she could have been another Shakespeare back then. This amount of literature and writing from women was blocked off and never shown because of the social world that Virginia Woolf wanted to break. 

 The difference between “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “A Room of One’s Own” is that one story is more about mental issues while the other story is more focused on having a room of your own and the need for education. In “The Yellow Wallpaper” we see that the main message is mental health as the narrator is treated with melancholia, and then she goes insane over the treatments. Throughout the entire story, the reader gets to see the perspectives and thoughts in the narrator’s mind as she goes insane over time. Through her eyes, the narrator seems that she is perfectly fine, however, on the outside compared to the surrounding people, she has completely gone mad. Back then in the 19th century, there wasn’t much proper help on mental health, hence why some treatments may have backfired on patients, which is the case of the narrator in this story. Even Charles Stetson went through the same treatment as the one in the story, saying that the treatment that she had gotten when she had melancholia didn’t work at all. In “A Room of One’s Own” Virginia Woolf focuses more on literature and how a woman should have a room for their thoughts and creativity. Throughout her story, Mary constantly has thoughts that she sticks to longer than normal, again these thoughts were the same as Virginia's. During some of these deep thoughts, Mary gets interrupted by others for either trespassing at the male-only university or some other reasons. This interruption makes Mary lose her train of thought and ideas that could have proved her points, but this only proves Virginia's point that women need a room of their own for creative thinking and writing due to getting pulled away from Mary’s thoughts even though she was concluding. Another message that Virginia Woolf talked about is that if one is to create literature or any form of artwork, he/she must have the education to do those activities. She shows this message by creating Judith, Shakespeare’s sister; she describes that Shakespeare was only famous in his work because of the education he was given. For Judith, she didn't have that opportunity to have an education, nor was influenced to read or write, making her creativity and thoughts lost and never shown to the public for her creativity. 

Overall, the differences between the two stories are that “The Yellow Wallpaper” focuses more on mental issues, while “A Rooms of One’s Own” focuses more on education and having a room. Both stories had similar themes of social norms and how that affected the story or message. There are obvious differences where one story is fully based on mental issues and the other is more focused on women’s equality and having a room of their own. Even with such polar and alike ideas, both stories give the message clear to the reader of the way of life from a different point of view.