Romantic Relationships in “Hills like White Elephants” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Hemingway’s “Hills like White Elephants” is a short story about the episode in the life of a couple who decide on the fate of their unborn baby, while Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” narrates about couple’s vacation to cure a wife from depression, but eventually leads the latter to total madness. Romantic and marital relationships are the key themes in both stories. “Hills like White Elephants” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” reveal the unequal position of men and women in relationship, where a man is dominant and imposes his will on his partner, while a woman conforms to his desires, but eventually manages to break through the oppression and societal constraints.
The dominance of man in relationship is clearly manifested in Hemingway’s “Hills like White Elephants”. The author depicts a relationship between man and woman, who quarrel and oppose each other trying to decide what to do with their unborn baby, but it is surely a man who demonstrates his dominant role. For example, the first phrase in the dialogue between the two is asked by a girl Jig: “What should we drink?” (Hemingway, 2003, p. 475). It shows that a girl gives away the possibility of making decision to her partner, as he is the one who is older, wiser and more experienced. The similar pattern is shown in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, where a husband, who is also a physician, is the one to decide what is better for his wife. It is his will for her not to write, even though it is the only thing that brings her joy and he is the one leaving her alone for days in the room doing nothing saying that she is “absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until [she] is well again” (Perkins Gilman, 2015, p. 392). Both stories exemplify traditional dominant roles of man in society and in relationship in particular.
Women, on the other hand, have to bear the load of pressure from the side of their partners, which also shown the inequality prevalent in the relationship of the time. The girl has to make a particularly difficult decision whether to make an abortion or not, but the man is imposing his will on her not allowing her to think for herself. For example, she has to take defensive position, while the man is attacking her with his opinions on the issue: “That’s the only thing that bothers us. It’s the only thing that’s made us unhappy” (Hemingway, 2003, p. 476). Such implicit pressure seems passive aggressive and puts the girl in an inferior position towards the man. Moreover, Hemingway always refers to a male in the story as a man, and a woman as a girl which also stress the roles the two take in the relationship. In Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” it is obvious that the woman hardly realizes her inferior position. She thinks that her husband knows better and suppresses her discontent: “John laughs at me, of course, …
