In understanding the two stories "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin it really helps people to understand how oppressed and mistreated these women were in the nineteenth century. Both of these stories use different examples to show that oppression causes one woman to go crazy and another woman to die of too much joy because her husband died. These stories compare in a lot of ways while also taking very different turns to show the levels of oppression and how they affected the women. By using the metaphor of the yellow wallpaper and the pun of the "Joy that kills" comparing these stories show two different techniques of the way women were oppressed one by being stuck in room for months on end and the other by just living in a society where she could not make her own decisions. The similarities of the stories revolve around both women being in the oppressive society that was the majority of the 1900's. In comparing these two stories they give a much more powerful effect on how badly oppression can affect people in such negative way by showing how they were effecting in married life through the symbolism and society through the settings.

The two stories here have many of the same scenarios, both with the same underlying message that both women are being oppressed by their husbands and both women end up in a worse place at the end of the story because of this oppression. Symbolism plays a major role in both of these stories making it a great way to understand how badly oppression effects those on a societal level as well as in their marriage during this time period. The main symbolism in the "The Yellow Wallpaper" is the yellow wallpaper which is the point in the story when the woman in the room is stuck in the room looking at the wallpaper for so long she begins to hallucinate and see images in the wallpaper which she despises so much. The woman is being treated for a nervousness disorder by her husband in which the treatment plan for her is to stay in a room with the windows barred and yellow wallpaper which she tries to get changed. The yellow wallpaper in the short story is a symbol for the way she feels oppressed by her husband in society because she is not allowed to do anything. An example of this happens after she sees the woman beneath the bars shaking them at night in the wallpaper she then says "I think that woman gets out in the daytime!" (pg. 218) This hold an extreme amount of importance for the symbolism of the wallpaper because as we later find out that the woman in the wallpaper is actually herself. The significance of this quote is that essentially the woman is getting out of her prison only during the day correlating to when her husband leaves the house to go to work and she is allowed to leave the room and make decisions for herself. However, whenever he comes home and throughout the night she is trapped and oppressed with no way to leave the room because she has not say in what goes on why her husband is home because this is how society worked and women were to take the back seat. The woman ends up eating the wallpaper to try and ripping it off the wall to stop her husband and Jane his sister to keep her in the room and oppressed so she can be happy again. The symbolism in "The Story of an Hour" is not physical like the wallpaper yet it is emotional expressed in the same way that the wallpaper was as a way of showing how the oppression negatively affected women at this time. In the story of an hour there is a woman named Mrs. Mallard who has heart problems so people try to break her easily to the news that her husband is dead.  When she hears this Mrs. Mallard becomes overwrought with happiness at the news of her husband's unfortunate accident. She immediately thinks to herself, "What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the as the strongest impulse of her being." (pg. 224) This just goes to show what a horrible life she had been living throughout her married life that she would become her happiest when her husband died a man she admitted to loving some of the time, yet has never been happier or felt free. Then the fact that when her husband walked through the door at the end, she died because she camde from too much joy that was taken away from her because she knew her freedom would now be gone, and just like that she would be under the thumb of society again. The oppression during this time from the physical treatment of a doctor locking his wife into a room or the emotional happiness from a woman whose husband just died to show she is finally free truly showing the effect of the oppression of women during this time, and how it destroyed lives.

The other thing noticed when comparing both stories is the setting the women were both placed in to show the confinement of women during this time and how they were oppressed in society not just in married life. In "The Yellow Wallpaper" the woman is literally locked in a room for months on end until she goes insane and she is not allowed to see her newborn baby. This and the fact that there is a room in this house where the windows are barred from the outside suggests that this is a normal setup or treatment of women during this time to lock them in their rooms for months, and begs the question why are the windows barred what reason is there to bar them has something bad happened when this treatment was last tried and if so are women so insignificant during this time to society that this is deemed humane. Another thing that strikes the room as the only place for women at the time is that it is the only place the woman is allowed to go and the only place that is talked about throughout the entire story not once did it talk of anything outside of the room. Almost as if saying that the women were so oppressed the social norm for them and the only place to be was in the bedroom never leaving the house. This is also the case in "The Story of an Hour" where the story is once again placed in a single room where she has almost no contact to the outside world except through the door where they tell her that her husband has died. Seeing as both these stories are written about the same time period with so many similarities it goes to show how the oppression of women was so obvious and degrading that society only saw them as people that worked in the home and did not have their own rights or freedom as shown in "The Story of an Hour", and in "The Yellow Wallpaper" when the woman thinks she is in the wrong and does not question her husband when she is locked in the room for three months, showing the negative effects of oppression from a societal level through the similarities in settings and the feeling of not being free in the women.

In conclusion, by comparing the two short stories "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "The Story of an Hour" by Kate Chopin the total amassed effect of oppression on women during the 19th century is astounding in such a way that no one would wish their fates on anyone. Through the uses of symbolism and settings both authors have shown how both women were helpless in their own situations to do anything to change them that one of them died and one thought she was in the wallpaper. Thus in comparing these too marvelous works on the time that was the 19th century and the movement of women's rights the negative effects of this oppression women faced are harrowing.

