In these stories, Tillie Olsen's I Stand Here Ironing, Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, each has common situations about the main characters but the outcome of each is different. Different people handle struggles in different ways. In all the stories freedom was taken away in one way or another. All were struggling with inner conflicts about conforming to other people's wants or needs. The characters in all stories had to deal with abandonment in some form. All dealt with emotional and mental abuse. All women found their own way of escaping from conforming to what other people thought they should do. All three stories deal with the oppression of women. The women in these three stories are all confined in one way or another, either by society or by their own minds. The oppression of women is described several times in the three stories. Women didn't have the right to voice their own opinions. They were not allowed to have a!

ny of their own thoughts or ideas. All three stories had someone in their life that was actually in control of them.

In Olsen's, the missing father and society are the domi

nant figures; for the reasons she had to make the decisions she did and in Gilman's and Chopin's the husbands were in control of the woman. In Olsen's I Stand Here Ironing, the constraints of oppression were alive in her thoughts. Olsen's facade was being a housewife, she would have rather had other choices in her life and wanted more for her daughter as is told by the last quote in the story:

In summary, all three women had no choice in their lives or they chose not to have a choice but to follow society's way of thinking. "It was the only way we could be together, the only way I could hold a job" (Olsen 225). They did what they could do to cope and do stay within society boundaries of the feminine role in life. The outcome of each story is different in the way each dealt with the struggles of oppression, conflict and life. "But the reader sees the mother's strength more fully than the mother does herself"(Bauer). Olsen's character went through a lot of struggles but it only made her a stronger person whereas the other two stories the

She's lost hope of being free from her prison within the mansion. "I don't feel as if it was worthwhile to turn my hand over for anything..."(Gilman 412). Olsen's story the daughter has a lot of emotional problems from the lack of attention from her mother while she was growing up.

All the women found escape through very different ways, either behind a facade or death or insanity. Gilman's character escaped through insanity while Chopin's died of a "joy that kills"(Chopin 245). Olsen's main character escaped behind the facade of being a happy housewife, she conformed to what life had dealt her. She also found her escape with her new husband. "The mother's own needs to escape, to enjoy the outside world again with her husband..."(Kloss). Gilman's character summed it up best in when she states, "I've got out at last,' said I, "in spite of you and Jane" (Gilman 419). In their own way, they beat society and the people that oppressed them. All the women triumphed somewhat in their quest to freedom, Chopin's character dying of heart problems, Gilman's character creeping over her husband and Olsen's character surviving the rearing of her child in a hard economical time.

All three stories involve a comfort zone of a sort; in Gilman's her comfort zone became the yellow wallpaper, in Chopin's it was the room and in Olsen's it was the ironing. They could do their thinking while in their zone and no one could control their thoughts then. Gilman's character was so fascinated with the yellow wallpaper that she started hallucinating, seeing things that were not th

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1758
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)