Comparative Essay: Themes in 'The Yellow Wallpaper' & 'Hill House'

This comparative essay delves into the thematic similarities and differences between Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper' and Shirley Jackson's 'The Haunting of Hill House.' The essay explores the protagonists' experiences with isolation, societal constraints, and psychological distress. It examines the portrayal of women in the 19th and 20th centuries, focusing on themes of confinement, mental health, and the impact of patriarchal societies. The analysis highlights the use of supernatural elements, the concept of freedom versus confinement, and the expectations placed upon women within the context of their respective narratives. The essay concludes by emphasizing the writers' shared ability to depict the struggles and suffering endured by women seeking clarity and freedom, using nameless and shapeless entities to symbolize societal oppression.

Running Head: COMPARATIVE ESSAY ON THE THEMES OF ‘THE YELLOW
WALLPAPER’ AND ‘THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE’
Comparative Essay on the Themes of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and ‘The Haunting of Hill House’
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note:

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COMPARATIVE ESSAY ON THE THEMES OF ‘THE YELLOW WALLPAPER’ AND
‘THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE’
Introduction
The writings and discourses in literature are taken as the reflection of the society during
which it is written, and it shows the plight and the prevailing societal norms. The writings of
Charlotte Perkins Gillman has been based on her perception of the isolation, which was noted in
the domestic sphere of the early nineteenth century. ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is one of her
notable works, which shows the desperate condition of the woman declared unfit, for she did not
fit in the construct of women finding fulfillment in domestic life. While the work of Shirley
Jackson, one of the most notable psychoanalytical work depicting the confinement of a woman
and her entrapment in her psyche. Both works are based on a similar theme, which shows the
isolation from the outer world and its impact on the lives of the women. Both the works can be
read from the feministic point of view as both the writers showed a keen observance of the
feminine suppression. The essay will compare and contrast the themes which have been covered
in the works.
The Yellow Wallpaper
The Yellow Wallpaper portrayed the condition or rather the conditioning of women,
which was one of the most prevalent traits of the modern and civilized nineteenth-century
society. It depicts the suppression of women, which was veiled under the emotions of care and
love by the patriarchal atmosphere of the learned men of the era (Baker 2017). The same way the
woman in the story starts her narrative by showing her inquisitive nature about the house they
have rented for the summer for it was an elegant house. Her inquisition came at the cost of the
fact that it was an elegant house, and yet it has been lying vacant for a long time, and she
displays the sense of weirdness from the first day itself. The cause for renting the house is
informed to us by the narrating women that it was for her; her loving husband has rented this

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COMPARATIVE ESSAY ON THE THEMES OF ‘THE YELLOW WALLPAPER’ AND
‘THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE’
place. Although the place had beautiful rooms, she was given an ugly room situated on the first
floor, which she analyzes extensively and concluding that it has always been used for the people
who needed confinement. The depiction of the women and their condition is depicted by the use
of the furniture present in the room. There was only one window, and yet it was barred (Băniceru
2018).
Yet, the entirety of the story has been dealt with the woman’s obsession with the yellow
wallpaper in the room, which she forced to live in spite of her pleading and requesting to her
husband. The woman is shown to be disgusted by the wallpaper in the beginning, but the
restrains on her work as the device which pushes her towards the inevitable in analyzing the
wallpaper itself (Gilman 2020). Towards the end, she has nothing but the same tormenting
wallpaper on her mind; the woman measures even the smell, shape, and length until the time she
assesses that woman is residing in the insides of that paper and is creeping on her at times
(Brooks 2017). The psychology of the husband, John, is shown to be assessing his wife giving
into her fancies and that there was nothing to worry about. In the end, we see her locking herself
inside the room, for she starts associating herself with it and is determined to liberate the woman
inside by taking the wallpaper completely. The husband on entering the room at last faints at the
sight of his wife, which he perceives to be her descending into the oblivion of madness
(Cuadrado García 2019).
The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Haunting of Hill House’ was published almost three centuries
before the ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ yet the novel constitutes the same line of thought and the
experience of women confinement in the society. The narrative starts with the description of Dr.
John Montague, who was a parapsychologist, and in his attempt to establish his findings on the

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COMPARATIVE ESSAY ON THE THEMES OF ‘THE YELLOW WALLPAPER’ AND
‘THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE’
supernatural manifestations, he sent out letters to various people he carefully selected from
various psychic records (Jackson 2006). Out of the many Eleanor, the protagonist is one of them.
She readily agrees to be a part of the experience since she wanted to explore her newfound
independence. The author narrates her story in fashion, which makes the readers feel sympathy
towards her. She had spent a considerable amount of time looking after her mother, who has
been described as a ‘cross lady’ and the rest of the time she has spent alone on account of being
exhausted (Jackson 2006).
The story begins when she steals away the car that she co-owns with her sister, who did
not treat her equally and was bent on not allowing her to go Hill House, let alone take the car
with her. When she reaches the house, she meets a lovely and talkative girl called Theodore, and
soon they bonded together. The group who were to stay for the experiment was completed by the
arrival of Luke Sanderson, who was the heir of the Hill House and was there to keep an eye on
their actions. Things start taking a grave turn when the noises at night and the writings on the
wall appeared, and they start doubting each other (Pallotta 2019). Out of everyone, it was
Eleanor who was affected the most because the occurrences were directed her. This made Dr.
Montague to call his wife to help him understand the events taking place, and his experiment has
come to a dead end. She arrives with a friend of hers named Arthur Parker, and they both
believed in the supernatural, and she chose to evaluate the circumstances using planchette to
communicate with the entity present in the house (Mannay 2017). The situation turns bad to
worse when the planchette session showed that the events were actually meant for Eleanor, and
ultimately she is asked by everyone else to leave the house. She tries to persuade them, but being
forced to leave crashes her car on the way and commits suicide.

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COMPARATIVE ESSAY ON THE THEMES OF ‘THE YELLOW WALLPAPER’ AND
‘THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE’
Comparison
The themes of both the work though are different in their approach, yet both the
protagonist is shown to be declared as psychologically suffering due to their indulgence in their
fanciful ideas. Several themes coincide in both the work- the first one is the depiction of the
supernatural element present and experienced by both the protagonists. The wallpaper and its
pattern that the protagonist in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is forced to live with starts to form the
shape of a woman moving inside the wallpaper who creeps at her, and on the other hand Eleanor
was the only one in the group who found solace in the supernatural occurrences. Both these
stances can also be seen as the women trying to reach out for the women in themselves who have
been conditioned inside the domestic life and were never allowed to live their life as they
wanted.
The second theme which can be analyzed to be similar in the work is that of the concept
of freedom and confinement. In Gillman’s narrative, the women are confined by the love and
care of the husband and brother, who are both physicians and thinks that it is her indulgence in
her fancy ideas, and her willingness to write them down is the cause of her illness. It was rather
the isolation from nature and the restraint on her train of thoughts, which pushed her into mental
exhaustion. The ending of the story can be viewed from the feministic point of view when she
finally takes control and confines herself inside the room, but this time it was her own decision,
which gave her the strength to tear down the wallpaper to free the confined women. On the other
hand, Eleanor is forced and mistreated by her mother, whom the author describes the person she
hated most in the world, and yet in the different occurrences, it was the voice of her mother that
makes the biggest impact on her (Lian, Robson and Bondevik 2017).

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COMPARATIVE ESSAY ON THE THEMES OF ‘THE YELLOW WALLPAPER’ AND
‘THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE’
The themes of roles and the expectation from them showed the similarity in which they
were both pressurized into conforming to the societal norms of the nineteenth century. Both the
agent of the patriarchal society surprisingly shares the common name and profession, each of the
John is a doctor by profession, and the fact that one was trying to establish his findings of the
supernatural occurrences of the Hill House is an aspect where they differed (Tharp 2016). As
John in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is shown to be the most caring husband and completely put a
restraint on his wife to work her mind. His sole motive was to take her away from the life in the
city where she was trying to use her ideas and put in the paper, which, according to him, was the
cause of her illness. But in reality, her illness was the forced care that imprisoned her inside the
rooms of her own house, where she was not even allowed to look out the windows for too long.
The reminder John gives her of their child and for the sake of whom she had to push herself to
regain her bodily strength is again the symbol for the chains of the society bounding her (Van
Loo 2019). While in Eleanor’s case after the death of her mother, that place of suppression is
taken up by her sister and brother-in-law who tries to isolate her from worldly possession such as
the case of car which they co-owned but she had to beg for it and in spite of asserting it several
times is declared to not being ‘allowed’ to take it.
In conclusion, both the work display a sharp similarity with the way authors have used
the supernatural entity, which stays nameless and shapeless to embody the complete society as a
whole being the hand of oppression. The works though written by writers whose canon of
writings were different shows the stark similarity of the portrayal and experiences of women
which screams of the struggle and suffering they had to endure to gain the clarity and freedom in
their life.

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COMPARATIVE ESSAY ON THE THEMES OF ‘THE YELLOW WALLPAPER’ AND
‘THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE’
References
Baker, J.A., 2017. Missing Mother: The Female Protagonist's Regression to the Imaginary Order
in Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, The Sundial, and We Have Always Lived in
the Castle.
Băniceru, A.C., 2018. Gothicizing Domesticity–The Case of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edgar
Allan Poe. Romanian Journal of English Studies, 15(1), pp.9-16.
Brooks, A.N., 2017. Nursery versus Straightjacket: The Feminist Paradox of “The Yellow
Wallpaper”. Papers & Publications: Interdisciplinary Journal of Undergraduate Research, 6(1),
p.18.
Cuadrado García, D., 2019. Northanger Abbey and" The Yellow Wallpaper": Gothic narratives
of confinement, madness and imagination.
Gilman, C. (2020). The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins
Gilman. [online] Gutenberg.org. Available at:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1952/1952-h/1952-h.htm [Accessed 5 Feb. 2020].
Gonzalez, C.S., 2019. The Perfectly Unadjusted Woman: Reading Adaptation in “Tulips” and
“The Yellow Wallpaper”. Humanities Bulletin, 2(2), pp.175-184.
Jackson, S., 2006. The Haunting of the Hill House. Penguin Classics.

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COMPARATIVE ESSAY ON THE THEMES OF ‘THE YELLOW WALLPAPER’ AND
‘THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE’
Lian, O.S., Robson, C. and Bondevik, H., 2017. Women with long-term exhaustion in fictional
literature: A comparative approach. In Reading the Psychosomatic in Medical and Popular
Culture (pp. 113-127). Routledge.
Mannay, D., 2017. Revisiting Shirley Jackson's' The Haunting of Hill House'.
Pallotta, J., 2019. The Effect of Collective Psychology on the Mistreatment of Nineteenth-
Century Women in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's" The Yellow
Wallpaper".
Tharp, A.L., 2016."Out of the Dark Confinement!" Physical Containment in Mid-Nineteenth-
Century American Protest Literature.
Van Loo, T.E.I., 2019. "Most women do not creep by daylight": Defining Female Madness in
Shirley Jackson’s The Bird’s Nest, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in
the Castle.