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Comparison of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “The Darling” In Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s, “The Yellow Wallpaper”, and Anton Chekhov’s, “The Darling”, we are
introduced to main characters with lives surrounded by control. In Gilman’s,
“The Yellow Wallpaper”, the main character, which remains nameless, is
controlled by her husband, John. He tells her what she is and is not allowed to
do, where she is to live, and that is she is not permitted to see her own child.
In Chekhov’s, “The Darling”, the main character, Olenka, allows her own opinions
and thoughts to be those of her loved ones. When John puts the narrator into the
room, she writes in despite of him telling her that she should not. At the end
of her first passage, the narrator tells us, “There comes John, and I must put
this away – he hates to have me write a word”. The narrator was told that
writing and any other intellectual activity would exhaust her.
The only thing
that exhausts her about it is hiding it from them. The narrator tells us, “I did
write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal – having
to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition”. Conrad Shumaker
suggests that John believes that if someone uses too much imagination then they
will not be able to figure out reality. “He fears that because of her
imaginative ‘temperament’ she will create the fiction that she is mad and come
to accept it despite the evidence – color, weight, appetite – that she is well.
Imagination and art are subversive because they threaten to undermine his
materialistic universe” In Gilman’s “Why I Wrote the Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman
tells us that when she was sent home from the rest cure, Dr. Mitchell gave her
“solemn advice to ‘live as domestic a life as far as possible,’ to ‘have but two
hours intellectual life a day,’ and ‘never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again’
as long” as she lived. The narrator cannot even be around or raise her baby.
John hired a nanny, Mary, to take care of him. This even makes her more nervous.
The narrator tells us, “It is fortunate Mary is so good with the baby. Such a
dear baby! And yet I cannot be with him, it makes me so nervous”. In this short
story, the narrator was forced to stay without her baby. In the introduction
Thomas L. Erskine and Connie L. Richards tell us, Gilman was “very much like her
father in important ways, for she ‘abandoned’ her daughter to her husband and
like him, preferred to deal with her emotions at a distance – in letters, books,
or in her fiction”. From this we see that Gilman actually had a choice on
whether to be without her child. In the story, the narrator was told not to have
her child around because of stress. When the narrator tells about the room, she
says, “I don’t like our room a bit. I wanted something downstairs that opened to
the piazza and had roses all over the window, such pretty old-fashioned chintz
hangings! But John would not hear of it”.
The room has barred windows and “rings
and things in the walls”. The narrator hates the ugly yellow wallpaper, but when
she wanted John to change it, he told her “that I was letting it get the better
of me, and nothing was worse for a nervous patient than to give way to such
fancies”. Every time the narrator asked John for a different room, he threatens
her with a room in the basement. Personally, I believe that John is doing
everything wrong to help the narrator. Treating her like a child did not help
her get well, it was her own strength at the end of the story that made her well
again. John told the narrator not to write, see her child, and which room to
live in. In Chekhov’s, “The Darling”, Olenka’s opinions changed with and as
often as her husbands. When she was married to Kukin, the manager of a theatre,
all of her thoughts were of the theatre. Whatever “Kukin said about the theatre
and the actors she repeated.” She repeated these things as if she loved the
theatre her entire life. She never even spoke of the theatre until Kukin came
into her life. Only three months after Kukin dies, she meets Pustovalov, a
timber merchant, and marries him. She started talking about timber as if “she
had been in the timber trade for ages and ages, and that the most important and
necessary thing in life was timber.” She even “dreamed of perfect mountains of
planks and boards, and long strings of wagons, carting timber somewhere far
away.” Olenka never allowed for thoughts or opinions of her own. “Her husband’s
ideas were hers.
If he thought the room was too hot, or that business was slack,
she thought the same.” She lived happily with him for six years with all
opinions surrounding around timber. After Pustovalov dies, she only stays alone
for six months. “It was evident that she could not live a year without some
attachment.” Olenka then marries a veterinary surgeon. “She repeated the
veterinary surgeon’s words, and was of the same opinion as he about everything.”
This would embarrass him that she would try to talk about animals and things as
if she knew about them. “I’ve asked you before not to talk about what you don’t
understand. When we veterinary surgeons are talking among ourselves, please
don’t put your word in. It’s really annoying.” When he would tell her this she
would ask, “But, Volodichka, what am I to talk about.” Olenka had nothing in her
life meaningful to herself that was worth bring up in conversation. She would
surround her life around her husband and his whole life. “She wanted a love that
would absorb her whole being, her whole soul and reason – that would give her
ideas and an object in life, and would warm her old blood.” Olenka was alone
shortly after marring the veterinary surgeon, when he departed to Siberia with
his regiment. Being alone she “thought of nothing, wished for nothing.” Without
a man to structure her thoughts, she could not have any. It was as if Olenka
never learned how to think for herself. Her thoughts were always for someone
beside herself. When Olenka was alone “she had no opinions of any sort. She saw
the objects about her and understood what she saw, but could not form any
opinion about them, and did not know what to talk about.” Olenka had nothing to
make conversation and if she would make conversation, she could not give her
opinion. In conclusion, both women had a strong control factor in their life. In
“The Yellow Wallpaper”, the main character makes no decisions of her own. Her
husband, John, controls everything she does. In “The Darling”, the men
surrounding her life control all of Olenka’s opinions. The men do not mean for
it to be this way but that is just how Olenka is. She allows herself to not be
able to think on her own. These characters have similar personalities. They both
allow themselves to be controlled throughout their lives.
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