Woman in the literature

In the modern world the woman has the same rights, as the man. Now she even can challenge the rights of the man. The statement "weak" to the woman can be included as the insult. But whether always women were equal in rights in relation to men? No... Women have passed a long way of revolutions and reformations.  All began with attempts to change the relationship inside the family, in the eyes of the friends, in a society. What occasions had women when they have started trying to change the system that was developed in the society for a long time?
Some examples of how women were treated in the past we can find everywhere, but for my point of view in the literature of that time we can find the most emotional, the most detailed pictures of women life. For my task I have chosen 2 stories which in my opinion can show some interesting moments from a life of ordinary women.
First one is “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. This story tells as about relationships inside the family. For the first look the main heroin and her husband John are happy couple. John’s wife is sick by her own words, but John said that she is just nervous. But when we read further, we understand that yes, John loves her, but it isn’t kind of love his wife wants. He doesn’t really listen to her, he often away from her. He talks and treats her like she is a baby (he called her a blessed little goose). It seems to me, that he doesn’t take her serious, John think that because he is her husband and a physician he knows everything. It hard to imagine that in the present time husband was telling his wife what to do all the time. John even said that it’s better to his wife not to think, he said that writing is bad too, because she gets tired of it. But when we write, don’t we think what we write about?
What examples I get from “The yellow wallpaper”? This story showed me that husband barely listened or talked to his wife. For me, wife in this story looks more like a little girl or a doll for her husband. For my point of view it’s even a little bit not human to put own wife in the room (that she doesn’t like), told her to sleep, not to think at all and then everything will be fine. It looks like that John just hides her from everybody, because she wasn’t “standard wife”.
Second  story that I choose was “A Wagner Matinee” by a Willa Cather. This story is about an old lady, that one was a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory, then gets marriage and lived in the village, but when she visits Conservatory many years later she  refuses to go back home  at the end of the play. Because memories from old times, memories of her success in the past shocked her. Living all these years in the village she got used to live without music, without feeling that made her happy. I think that this story shows how much women of the past gave up for the marriage.


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