Women Experience in "The Husband Stitch" and "Yellow Wallpaper"
The stories The husband stitch by Carmen and Yellow wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman tell the experiences of women in a world dominated by men and cultural oppression. The husband stitch is a story with other stories in it that say about the world we live in. The narrator, who does not mention her name, provides directions in parenthesis on how to loudly read the story. The story begins with a first-person narrator who throughout the story is not identified. At the age of seventeen, the narrator meets a young boy at a party and falls for him. The story revolves around a ribbon tied around the throat of the narrator, child-bearing, and what goes on in the marriage of the narrator. It does not tell what the green ribbon represents, although it can be viewed to represent an identity or top secret. On the other hand, The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman describes the story of the narrator who undergoes post-natal depression after giving birth to her son. The husband of the narrator, John, being a physician, diagnoses her behaviour and prescribes rest for her. The prescription does not work and subjects her to more mental illness. These two texts have a similar way of treating the issue of the oppressive nature of gender rules and adverse effects of medications, although the contents are quite varying.
The first similarity of the two stories is that the narrators are living in a male-dominated world, with both women having patronizing husbands. The outcome of childbirth determines the well-being of the mother and the situation of the family thereafter. After she gave birth to her baby boy, The husband stitch's narrator is given something to make her sleepy as she gets ready to be fixed the cut made to facilitate easy natural birth. Her husband jokingly asks the doctor about the cost of an extra stitch, 'The husbands stitch' which she overhears. Although she tries to defend herself with a small moan, none of the men pay her attention. When she wakes up, the stitch has already been given to her even without her consent. The doctor says, 'You're all sewn up, don't you worry, Nice and tight, everyone's happy. The nurse will speak with you about the recovery.' This statement from the doctor reveals how women are used as sexual objects by men. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator also suffers from post-natal depression. The husband, who is a physician, takes leave to take care of his wife after he prescribes her with depression. This is revealed in the description the narrator gives at the beginning of the story. John, her husband, exposes the depressed wife to a calm and clean air life to allow her have rest and recover from her condition. The narrator, instead of recovery goes on with suffering, which John ignores and terms it as just a slight hysterical tendency.
According to Doherty (2010), women have constant negotiations of desires and expectations during birth, both between her and the support team. The desires of women in these two stories are not met and unexpected things happen. John's wife goes into depression instead of experiencing the joys of a child. The support team of The husband Stitch narrator do not grant her the desires of childbirth, and regardless of not agreeing with their decision of the extra stitch, the men go-ahead to perform it. Carlton, Stoneman and Callister (2005) suggested that nurses and doctors could have significant impacts on the feelings of women about their confidence from the birth decisions they make. This is what the narrator of The husband Stitch goes through, since the effects of the stitch makes her bear no other child. She says, 'We never have another child, though not for lack of trying. I suspect that Little One did so much ruinous damage inside of me that my body couldn't house another'. The childbirth postconditions reveal how men continue dominating over women.
Secondly, both Carmen and Gilman present the wave of feminism and try to identify the readers with the plight women go through as they assert their agency in the repressive culture. The narrator in The husband stitch tells a story of a girl who requests something from her lover she had told her family about, but instead, the family hauls her off to a sanitarium. The narrator asks, 'What magical thing could you want so badly that they take you away from the known world for wanting it?' This question illustrates the oppression that women were subjected to, with no right to make decisions. A similar case is seen in Charlotte's The Yellow Wall-Paper. The narrator's husband prescribes rest for her so that she could recover from the post-natal depression she is going through. However, the narrator continually complains that her husband treated her like a child, and hardly listens to the worries she tells him about her condition. From her story, she does not like the house they are living in and continuously tells her husband to move to the ground floor room. However, John dismisses her views and sees them as a silly fantasy. Also, the rest includes forbidding the narrator from doing any activity regardless of her longing to do her intellectual conversations and writing.
Thirdly, both stories reveal the feminist struggle in the midst of an oppressive culture. Women undergo suffering, and culture is used to justify the oppression they go through (Wallstrom, 2018). In the husband stitch narrative, a girl is dared by her peers to venture in a graveyard at night and decides to prove that she can live. The peers give her a knife that she would use to stick into the earth as proof that she managed to venture the graveyard. When she reached the cemetery, the narrator believes that she must have chosen a very old one since the self-doubt and belief could have tinged her choice that flesh and the intact corpse can pose more danger than that buried long time ago. She pinned the blade to the ground although, she did not manage to escape since something held her down, and she fell. The peers found her dead in the morning, and no one dared worry about what caused her death, it just did not matter regardless of her being innocent. The reason for the fatal adventure was her scoffing at her peers, since pride and scoffing for women was a great mistake. Likewise, John's wife undergoes a lot of suffering in the room her husband took her to have some rest. John goes away to tend to his duties the whole day and sometimes at night leaving his wife alone depressed by her nervous troubles. John does not recognize the suffering she is going through, since he easily dismisses her. Culture views women as stay-home people and is the same reason John uses to ignore the plight of his wife to stay in the room to just rest. She says, 'John does not know how much I suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him'. The two incidents show how cultural beliefs subjects women to struggles and suffering.
The first difference is that the narrators experience different consequences of medical treatments. The stories use a doctor's perspective to describe women. Few women pursued medicine during the 19th century because the culture only expected men to become doctors. The author of The Yellow wallpaper is brought out as the wife of a physician. The doctor forces her to spend some time resting as a recovery process from the post-natal depression. It was common to put someone under rest in early days, and patients were expected to engage in no activities. The prescription that John's wife is put under does not help her but instead seems to affect her mentally. The doctor involved in The husband stitch corporates with the narrator's husband to do an extra stitch to keep her tight. Such a practice is common in some places, although, in most of the times, the extra stitches are done without the woman's consent. From the birth of the boy, the narrator is medically affected since she cannot give birth anymore. She, however, lives happily with this condition, taking care of their only child.
Secondly, although women use societal norms to acquire their freedom, they do so in different ways. The Yellow wallpaper narrator lives under the custody that her husband had subjected her to. Her depression makes the narrator become obsessive with the yellow wallpaper. She continually sees the image of a woman appearing in the yellow wallpaper, which can be interpreted as a symbol of her confinement to the lonely room. The narrator thinks that she shares the same situation with the image and destroys it, hoping that she will free the image. When she does that, John's wife feels like she has finally acquired the freedom she has been seeking. The husband stitch narrator also lives in the bondage of the green ribbon around the throat. She all along denies her husband the right to touch it, making it look like her special secret. When one night her boy sees the father trying to untie the ribbon, he attempts the same the following day. The narrator feels that denying the boy the chance to touch it would be losing something she will never regain. When the boy goes to school, she enrols into an art class for women, where she meets others with the ribbon although in different parts of their bodies. Later on, when the husband makes a final bid to get hold of the ribbon, she feels that he is not a bad man and decides to free herself from the bondage of the ribbon secret.
In summary, both stories show the plight of women and the nasty experiences they undergo in life. Both narrators live in environments dominated by men who control their lives. Adverse medical procedures help in reshaping the two stories, where one goes through a husband snitch to keep her tight, while the other suffers post-natal depression after giving birth. There is a clear indication that both the narrators lived a life bound by social norms. Both try to free themselves by obeying the social rules bonding them. John's wife tries to free herself by destroying the yellow newspaper, while the other narrator decides to let her husband hold the green ribbon. The husband stitch ends with rekindled love between the narrator and her husband.
