Contrasting Silkos Yellow Woman and Chopins Story of an Hour :: comparison compare contrast essays

Contrasting Silkos Yellow charr and Chopins Story of an HourOn the surface, the protagonists of Silkos Yellow Woman and Chopins Story of an Hour seem to have little in common. Yet upon closer inspection, both stories relate tales of women who are repressed by the social tenets that plant their roles as wives.From the viewpoint of Western society, the narrator of Yellow Woman might be considered immoral for her willing sexual encounter with a stranger. However, the stories related by her grandfather of the Yellow Woman demonstrate within her culture a more accepting attitude of her brief interlude Yellow Woman went by with the spirit from the north and lived with him and his relatives. She was gone a long time, but then one day she came back and brought twin boys.(188) Her grandfather certainly liked weighty the stories and seems to have admired the Yellow Woman on some level. Other societies do non share the Western idea of moral sexual behavior. The Egyptian ruling class, for e xample, sometimes married brother to sister, and other cultures have incorporated fertility rites into their belief systems. Even within our own society, marriages to cousins, which are considered wrong today, were not uncommon in past centuries. Given that her attitude regarding sex and marriage might differ from the Western norm, the central conflict of the story seems to be the narrators longing for freedom to choose her own destiny versus her more Westernized view of her role as wife and mother, a role that is traditionally subservient to the husband in Western society. There is the sense that she finds her daily life dull, though perhaps not unhappy, and when a chance encounter turned sexual, she again takes on a subservient role to a male. Her inability to make sense of her conflicting feelings causes her to appear weak and lacking in character and portrays her in a prejudicial light.By contrast, Louise Mallard, the protagonist in Chopins Story of an Hour, is a moral woman a nd loving wife, at least by Western standards. Her life is be by the accepted social ideal of a husbands will as final. She is so inured to this concept that only upon hearing the news of his death does her square(a) feeling of something too subtle and elusive to name (199) come forth. What she acknowledges to herself is that her marriage is not happy for her and she often resents her subservient role and a kind designing or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime.