"The Yellow Wallpaper" & "A Jury of Her Peers"

"The Yellow Wallpaper" and "A Jury of Her Peers" are both more modern Gothic short stories that represent the struggles of women in a patriarchal society.  They are much more developed than earlier stories and provide rich descriptions and remind me more of novels that I would read today.  "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a first person narrative that describes her life and her "rest-cure" isolation.  She seems to be going through a depression and as the story goes on, she continually loses her mind and becomes more and more insane.  Her husband, treats her like a child and shuts her up in a room, only to let her out at certain times in the day.  He treats her like a child, as he says "bless her little heart" and "what is it, little girl?" In the end, she ends up crawling over his body, demonstrating her child-like state.  She also starts to see things in the wallpaper.  At  first, she just sees the design, but she then begins to think there is somebody inside the wallpaper trying to get out, which probably represents herself.  The story employs a few traditional Gothic elements, such as the unreliable narrator and the motif of entrapment.  Since the author is losing her mind and her thoughts are changing as the story goes on, she can be considered an unreliable narrator.  The author uses a stream of conscious narration to develop the characters fall into madness.  The wife also feels entrapped, making the reader wonder if they are in some kind of home or a mental institution.  For example, the bed is nailed down, there are bars on the door, and the door is locked.  All these things demonstrate women's entrapment in the home and there loss of power over males.

"A Jury of Her Peers" dealt with similar issues of female submission, but it really discussed the differences between males and females and how they interact.  Ms. Wright is accused of killing her husband, who has an abusive and mean man.  Ms. Hale and Ms. Peters both go with their husbands to look through the house for clues of the death of Mr. Wright.  The house represents Ms. Wright's decline as it is dirty, with everything half done or all over the place.  The men immediately submit her behavior to questioning, but the women try to make the men understand how hard it is to keep a house tidy and in order.  Throughout the whole story, the men continually make judgments and the women try to protect Ms. Wright from there questioning.  For instance, the women stitch the entire piece of clothing because the stitching was not even, possibly representing Ms. Wright's downturn into insanity.  In addition, the women look inside Ms. Wright's "pretty jewelry box" and find a dead bird with its neck broken.  The women know how much the bird meant to Ms. Wright and decide to hide the bird from the men and withhold the evidence.  The story basically shows that men and women sometimes do not understand each other and their situations.  The women side with Ms. Wright because they understand what she had to go through underneath her husband and rationalize her reason for killing her husband.  The men, on the other hand, do not pick up on the clues the women see, showing that the two sexes have a long way to go before they will really understand their interior motives and what makes them tick.