Comparison of Three Nineteenth Century Short Stories

In the nineteenth century attitudes were very different to how they are today, as reflected in the books and short stories written in this period. The three short stories I shall be focusing on are:

* ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’—Charlotte Perkins Gilman

* ‘Tony Kytes-The Arch Deceiver— Thomas Hardy

* ‘The Stolen Bacillus’—H. G. Wells

I have selected these three short stories, as they appear to have similarities in some aspects and differences in others; they also reveal much about how life was in the nineteenth century.

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is about a woman who moves out to the countryside to undergo a rest cure treatment for postnatal depression. It is the story of how she is treated by her husband and those around her. Mental illness in the nineteenth century was misunderstood. It was treated in the opposite way to how it is treated now.

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is narrated by the main character entirely in diary form, so it gives a very personal view of the story and the emotions involved.

It starts by the narrator going straight into the story with no introduction or background knowledge given. The narrator and her husband are renting a country house to live in for the summer. It is shown in the first paragraph that the narrator thinks there is something strange about the setting by the way in which she describes it as “A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house…- but that would be asking too much of fate!” She is obviously suspicious of the house, and even seems slightly paranoid.

Her relationship with her husband John becomes clear very soon into the story. He is the dominating partner and takes it upon himself to look after her, believing that she is not able to look after herself and must be put in the responsibility of his, more capable hand ‘He assures friends and family there is really nothing the matte with me’. John also never listens to what she has to say, thinking her not intelligent enough to have her own views, and humours her slightly with all his replies. “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that.” This was very common in the nineteenth century. Men were by far the stronger sex and women were seen as weak.

She has learned to take it for granted that he won’t take her seriously, and expects to be laughed at whenever she approaches him with an idea. The narrator knows that it is frustrating, but feels helpless towards the attitude shown by all men towards her, including her brother. This is shown by the use of the phrase “what can one do?” being repeated three times in the first part of the story. It gives the impression of mild frustration and hopelessness. The most unnerving section is when she is explaining how her husband will not believe that she is ill, and has convinced all her friends and relatives that there is nothing wrong with her but a “slight hysterical tendency”. It is this that truly gives us an idea of how alone and helpless she must feel, repeating the phrase, “what can one do?” once again at the end of the paragraph.

When Gilman was writing the short story she could understand that women were treated as unequal to men and as being pathetic. Women were seen to have no intelligence about anything outside their own house. Gilman decided to write the story to show that women, like the narrator could have vivid imaginations. This is what happens in the case of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ ‘There is a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down.’ Although Gilman gives the narrator a vivid imagination she does not give her the power to control it, which makes her seem even weaker, this is maybe the view of Gilman who believes men are more powerful than women.

A similarity the story shows towards the modern day is that people still suffer from depression, and particularly from postnatal depression, although we have better ways of treating depression and understanding it. In the nineteenth century if an illness was not physical it would not be taken seriously. ‘John is practical in the extreme. He has no patience with faith, an intense horror of superstition, and he scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures’

Through the yellow wallpaper the health of the narrator seems to regress slowly. This is mainly due to the fact she is locked away, where she cannot even do the past times she loves to do. ‘There comes John, he hates me to write a word’.

John fails to notice that his wife’s health is declining, he works long hours ‘John is away all day, and even some nights when his cases are serious’. This shows awkwardness between John and his wife and also gives a stereotypical view of how life in the home was. The man went out to work while the women stayed at home.

The narrator also mentions how she is embarrassed to sometimes speak to her husband as he laughs at her. ‘He laughs at me about the wallpaper’ which is another sign of inequality between men and women as John’s wife would not dare say that to John.

John also reflects an attitude that many people would relate to today, that he does not want to renovate the house, as he will be moving out in three months. This maybe could be seen as very selfish, because that means other people will have to live in the same diminished house. Many people in the twentieth first century would have the same view on survival and why should they waste money to help lots of others in the long term.

Gilman’s writing was ahead of her time; she talked about issues that no one else dared to mention. Throughout Gilman’s life she worked for the trade union movement, for the cause of women’s suffrage and for more equal treatment of men and women in all aspects of their home and working lives. You can see this is in her writing as she tries to show the reader that women can think for themselves and do not always need to be dependent on men.

‘Tony Kytes-The Arch Deceiver’ is about Tony Kytes and the love troubles he has with three girls who are all willing to marry him. The reason the situation occurs is that in rural Britain in the nineteenth century women far outnumber men. The reason for this is the industrial revolution was giving men the chance of jobs in towns and cities, so men left the countryside to work. This gave men like Tony Kytes the opportunity to choose between women, even though we know Tony Kytes is nothing special to look at “twas a little, round, firm, tight face, with a seam here and there left by the smallpox”

Tony is engaged to Milly when the story begins, Tony is not displeased with Milly and is prepared to marry her. He then starts talking to Unity and invites her to sit in his wagon. She starts to question him “why did ye desert me for that other one? In what is she better than me?” Tony does not defend his relationship with Milly, but instead he leads Unity on into thinking she has a chance with him. “In fact, I never knowed you was so pretty before!” This shows Tony is quite a lady’s man. In the nineteenth century only men were supposed to flirt, but Hardy has gone against this and in several parts of the short story he adds some flirtatious language from women. ‘My dear Tony’ and ‘Certainly dearest Tony’. Although this flirting happened at the time, for Thomas Hardy to write about it was scandalous as many people refused to believe that this happened.

Thomas Hardy betrays women as being very unimportant in society. He makes their lives seem very dull and as if they only have the aim of getting married and having a family. Thomas Hardy also tells us that in this time in history women are supported by men all through their lives. Their fathers are in control of them until they find a husband, who will be able to control them. This could be seen as a different attitude compared to today when many children are from single parent families who have no male influence in their lives.

A similarity between Tony Kytes-The Arch Deceiver and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ is the way women are seen. Thomas Hardy treats women as very much second-class. He often makes them seem weak and stupid. Examples of this in ‘Tony Kytes- The Arch Deceiver’ are when Unity, Milly and Hannah cannot control the horses; ‘She can’t hold that horse in, you shouldn’t have left the reins in her hands’. This could be seen as humorous in the nineteenth century as it is like a pantomime. Charlotte Perkins Gilman does not make women seem as they are weak, but still shows them to be second-class and as if their views do not matter. An example of this is when nobody wants to listen to the narrator when she puts forward ideas on how to treat her postnatal depression. ‘Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change would do me good’

When Tony Kytes sees his dad calling him he goes straight over to him. He confesses the situation he had got himself in to with Unity, Milly and Hannah in his wagon. In the nineteenth century the father’s role was very important and they were like the law. Whenever your father told you to do something you would have to do it. Society at the time would be angry with Thomas Hardy for making Tony Kytes oppose his father, when he is advised to marry the only girl who did not invite herself to ride in Tony’s wagon. Tony’s actions could be seen as disrespect and doubting the control of the fathers’ role in the family in the nineteenth century.

When Tony asks Hannah to marry him for the final time she refuses, although she would have said yes if the circumstances had been different, because she had just been scratched due to Tony and her father had now appeared on the scene. Tony then asks Unity to marry him, but she too refuses because she does not want to be embarrassed by what Tony had just done to her. She walks away and hopes Tony will chase after her. Tony, as a last resort, asks Milly to marry him. Milly, being quite dim, accepts his marriage proposal, and asks Tony “did you really mean what you said to them”. Tony tells Milly he didn’t and Milly just accepted this. This shows how gullible Milly must be. It also shows that women were quite desperate to find a husband as all three of the girls were at different stages prepared to marry Tony.

Several aspects of this short story indicate that it was written and set in the nineteenth century. When Tony first sees Milly he notices she is wearing a father in her hat. This would be out of the ordinary today as women of Milly’s age would not usually wear hats with feathers in them, but it was quite usual in the nineteenth century.

Tony is travelling around in a wagon with horses pulling it. The reason for this is that the invention of automobiles is still in the development and are not commonplace yet. This way of travelling is very slow and this is indicated when we find out it is faster to walk than it is to travel by wagon.

We also find out that the roads in villages are very poor, and that it is hard to drive the wagon around; this is because the industrial revolution has not yet spread from the cities into the more rural parts of the countryside.

‘The Stolen Bacillus’ is about a scientist who is studying cholera. An anarchist steals some of the cholera, which is being kept in a bottle with the aim of becoming famous by spreading the cholera disease.

This story tackles the issue of cholera, cholera was quite a major part of people’s lives in the nineteenth century, but luckily today it has been eradiated due to cleaner water supplies. People feared cholera in the nineteenth century, as they knew if an outbreak occurred whole families could be wiped out.

The idea of the anarchist having the intention to contaminate London’s water supplies was very far fetched in the nineteenth century. Such ideas of terrorism were unknown and no one thought anyone would be prepared to kill themselves to cause pain and suffering to large numbers of other people. Examples of people committing such suicidal terrorism in the modern day would be Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaida Network, which caused massive destruction in New York at the World Trade Centre on September 11 2001. H. G. Wells was very ahead of his time to imagine such modern day atrocities with pure evil intentions. But even he could properly never have been able to predict the power of terrorism in today’s world, with people who potentially have the power to destroy the whole world.

The bacteriologist mentions that when he had given the Asiatic cholera to a kitten, three puppies and a sparrow they had all turned different shades of blue. This was very common in the nineteenth century to test such experiments on innocent animals. People had the general attitude that this was okay in the nineteenth century, as people did not seem to have the same feelings for domestic animals, as people seem to have today in the twenty first century. If a scientist was to perform such experiments on these animals today there would be massive amounts of outrage with many animal right campaigners demonstrating against it. This behaviour in the nineteenth century would be an outrage, as nobody would demonstrate against a scientist or bacteriologist who is leading the world in scientific exploration.

Views of women in this short story are similar to the other two short stories. Women are seen as inferior and are not given important jobs. The only woman in ‘The Stolen Bacillus, is the wife of the bacteriologist. She is like an assistant, who just helps out her husband. An example of this is when she chases her husband around the streets of London with his shoes and coat. This could be seen as comical as in this period of time men usually chased after the women instead of the women chasing the man like in this incident, a cab driver even points this out ‘she’s a-following him, usually the other way round’. She obviously has nothing better to do than help her husband. This would not happen today as women have gained near complete equality to men in all aspects of life. They now have the opportunities to have top jobs without the restrictions that were in place in the nineteenth century. Views of women in the nineteenth century were that they were inferior to men and second class. This is the same in all three short stories and all the authors’ style their short stories in this way by showing women to be weak. This was the general attitude by everyone and showed little equality between men and women.

There are also comical aspects to this short story. When the anarchist steals the solution the bacteriologist chases him around London in cabs. He is then followed by his wife, which could be seen as comical because they are chasing each other through the streets of London. This would be a very unlikely situation to happen today, as the streets in London have many police officers patrolling them.

At this time in history study into bacteria is not very developed. Animals are still being tested on with dyes and the bacteriologist still knows little about the cholera.

The language in all three short stories could be seen as being old fashioned. Words are in the style of how they were in the nineteenth century. Examples of this in the three short stories are in ”The Yellow Wallpaper” they call a doctor a physician. In ‘Tony Kytes-The Arch Deceiver’ there are many old nineteenth century words used including ‘o the petticoats went off, and the breaches went on’. In ‘The Stolen Bacillus’ there are also several nineteenth century words used including ethnology.

The most successful short story for telling me about the nineteenth century was ‘Tony Kytes-The Arch Deceiver’ Thomas Hardy had written about lots of different occurrences that took place in the nineteenth century and has had the courage to write about the true happenings. This short story would have also caused the most outrage in the nineteenth century as it tells the truth about such issues as women flirting with men and sons and daughters disobeying their fathers. Although people in the nineteenth century knew about these happenings they did not want to have to be reminded about them and read about them.

The most successful short story to people in the nineteenth century was ‘The Stolen Bacillus’. I think this would have sold the most copies in shops as it was about cholera, which many people would have been interested in. It was also not as controversial as the other two short stories as it didn’t tackle issues that were as delicate.

‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ would have been seen as a very controversial short story in the nineteenth century. It was mainly centred on postnatal depression and mental illness. This topic was not widely talked about at this period in time as it was seen to be an embarrassment if you knew someone with a mental illness.

Although I have referred to the three short stories as all being written in the nineteenth century, they were actually written in the 1890s. I think a better genre for the three short stories would be early twentieth century, as they would fit in that category more than the nineteenth century.