Hills Like White Elephants

Love is very hard to define since everyone has different concepts in what love is. However, in order to achieve a good relationship, people must have a well balance power structure in their relationships, a good understanding and communication between them. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemmingway reflect the traditional gender roles of the late 1800’s, through the perspective of male dominance. In these stories the males predominates the females, and the characters seems to lack understanding, and communication towards another, which becomes the main cause of the females’ oppression. The domination of the men in the lives of both women causes them to go through certain mental stages, from naïve views of their situations, to more complex realizations of their anxieties. In the story The Yellow Wallpaper, the narrator begins her story naively listening to everything her husband tells her. She doesn’t realize that her illness is starting to worsen nor does she realize she is being oppressed. She says “congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good.” However, John, insists the complete opposite, saying she needs nothing but rest, but the narrator states that “personally, I disagree with their ideas” this did not stop her from doing exactly what the man told her to do. This shows that even though the narrator is aware of the problem, and if she goes against her own thoughts on the matter to listen to her husband, her condition will somehow improve.
In the beginning of Hills Like White Elephants, Jig is as naïve as the woman from The Yellow Wallpaper. Jig also tries to believe everything the man says. She held onto a bit of hoping when she asked, “And if I do it you’ll be happy and things will be like they were and you’ll love me?” This shows that Jig is willing to do almost anything and go against what she believes to make things normal with the American again, but in this case the only