"The Story of an Hour" and "The Yellow Wallpaper"

“The Story of an Hour” Disscussion Question

In “The Management of Grief”, Shaila is calm and collected on the outside when she was grieving for her husband but on the inside she is truly sad and misses her husband and children. In “The Story of an Hour”, Louise is sad by the news but when she goes into her room to be alone, she realizes that she is free from her husband and that she didn’t always love him and was happy that he would be gone because now she could live a long happy single life without the strings of a husband attached. The point of view impacts our observation because with Shaila, we knew that inside she was truly saddened by her loss even though she did not show it to the others but with Louise, she is the opposite and acts sad in front of her family and friends while she was actually happy about being a widow now. Had we not been able to know exactly what either character was really thinking, it would have been easy to just think the exact opposite of both characters and think that Shaila did not care and that Louise was deeply saddened and lost by the each of their losses.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” Discussion Questions

The biggest symbol throughout the book that I noticed was the wallpaper itself. It represented insanity becoming more aware throughout the character as each day passed. Every day that the narrator spends in the room actually causes her insanity to become worse instead of becoming better and each day the narrator stares at the wallpaper more and more and finds new things to call her attention so that she has to stare it all the time and figure out who that other woman is behind the design of the wallpaper.

I think Gillman’s motives are that she herself was once insane and depressed and was told to be put on bed rest by a doctor until her “hysteria’ subsided, but instead of helping her, the treatment actually made her worse. She said that the only thing that helped was by writing and she makes the narrator exactly the same, told to be on bed rest but instead makes her more insane and also that she, the narrator, was not allowed to write because that would make it worse. If she knew that the methods that she herself went through didn’t work, she knew that this story would speak to others who went through the same thing and could relate to the main character just by that one trait.