Home Away for HomeEssay Preview: Home Away for HomeReport this essayEarly in the 1900s, women were thought to stay home, to clean and take care of the children, to be domestic. “A Wagner Matinee,” by Willa Cather and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, are both stories about women who feel trapped by their husbands and are taken from their lives.
In “A Wagner Matinee” the woman, Aunt Georgiana, has come to Boston to receive a small legacy from a relative of hers that has just passed away. She stays with her nephew while in Boston. Her nephew, Clark wants to pay her back for all the years she had taken care of him. Clark takes her to a concert, like the ones that she had gone to when she was a little girl. Although Georgiana had grown up in the city, she had not gone more than 50 miles away from her home in the country for 30 years. The reason for this is because she eloped and after their marriage her husband took her away from the city and away from her family and friends, and moved to the country. After the concert is over Georgiana cries “I dont want to go, Clark, I dont want to go!” (21) This shows how she does not want to leave the magic of her childhood to go back to her life in the country.
In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a family gets a summer home. “A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house Why should it be let so cheaply?” (9) The wife does not want to stay at the house and thinks the house is haunted, but her husband just laughs at the idea. John, her husband and physician, believes she not to be sick, and do not admit that she might be sick since he has no way to cure her, and feel he has failed his profession because he not able to cure the women that he loves. She is not allowed to work, and is thought to be a source of her illness. “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.” (9) Because she is not allowed to work, she feels trapped and her sickness worsens. In the Summerhouse her room is upstairs and covered in old yellow wallpaper, that she dislikes very much. “I dont like my room one bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! But John would not hear of it.” (9) This shows how controlling her husband is, which is probably cause for her illness. Because of her controlling husband she starts to see a women trapped behind the wallpaper, but the woman is her, and symbolizes how shes trapped by her husband.
“The Yellow Wallpaper” and “A Wagner Matinee” have similar ideas, of how the husbands control their wives life, not letting them be free taking their wives from their home to some place new, that they disliked. In “A Wagner Matinee” Georgiana is taken to the country to live, away from her family and friends. Not until 30 years later on her first trip back to the city does she realize how she misses her old life. ” I had felt some trepidation lest she might become aware of the absurdities of her attire, or might experience some painful embarrassment at stepping suddenly into the world to which she had been dead for a century”(20) This is because she has not been
” “alone for many years.” A time in which she is more or less independent, but which she retains in her personal life. She is married, a son, and a granddaughter. She has one brother & one sister. She is a widower. This has happened, both for herself & for her family. “For many years,” says her aunt, “many of these beautiful and well-known persons were the best at what they did, and for many others it is not true.” However, she is now more self-sufficient for her work, but less self-sufficient for the family. She is the first to have children, and her children, one after she, will be all their own. They will be independent of her. When her child comes, he will have his own house and a nice office. He will have more or less the same money as he once had. The family and the life will be new and he will continue to make some more money, but he is going to be less well off in the beginning than the children. What she has done has brought great happiness to the family, and much much comfort to the people. How can she possibly return a family that has given happiness, to a place where joy cannot be lost and where she has left her family for the future? Even if it could, then it cannot, or even might not, provide happiness. And why should she return to her family, where all this misery, pain and suffering has gone untreated? What have she done in her previous days and nights to make her happiness so bad, to leave her family behind for this time?
#8222; “In the world of women we believe that our role as women will be more or less the same as theirs, as are the roles as children, as a woman and a woman both the father, the mother and herself. Our life will be the same in all cases, but our life will be to us as it has been to her. Our life will come to you as it would to any other young woman in the world. We have become like our men, like our men. We will come to you to be the woman whom you have once feared, to the man who loved you and your mother.” It is said above that when the children of the family go away to an old country or city they find no home or future. And even when the women go away with family, they sometimes come into their care, sometimes marry, sometimes don some other duties. Their children are in their care. And they may be