Introduction In this essay, I will try to compare and contrast “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman using character analysis of Mrs. Louise Mallard and the story-teller for The Yellow Wallpaper. I will compare the two characters using author backgrounds, the concept of the works, as well as the disagreement in the viewpoints, and I must say that both stories are grim, although realistically presented. Thesis Statement The characters of Louise Mallard in “The Story of an Hour” and the storyteller for “The Yellow Wallpaper” are representative of what the authors want to express about themselves and their current situation. Discussion There are various ways and reasons why authors write and treat their stories and the stories’ characters in certain ways that could get into the reader but with subjective, albeit, different interpretations. It is therefore necessary to infuse a little background about the authors prior to delving into their stories and characters in order to provide an insight on what could be being represented or why such matters occurred in a story. For The Yellow Wallpaper, there had been conflicting views on Charlotte Perkin-Gilman’s motive in presenting an intrusive “wallpaper” on the story’s lead character and narrator. Nevertheless, to peek a view on Gilman herself, it was suspected that “The Yellow Wallpaper” was based on her own bout with mental illness and misguided medical treatment as when she married Walter Stetson in 1884 and gave birth to her daughter Katherine a year later, she became depressed that first year as she adapted to the domestic life of a wife. It has also been suggested that she felt pain rather than happiness when she held her baby (Kessler, 1995). The short story was about an upper-class white woman taken by her husband’s doctor to a country estate to recover from what is presumably postpartum depression. Assigned her room and instructed to remain in bed as she had been ailing, the woman becomes obsessively fixated upon the yellow paper on the walls of the room to which she is confined. At first, she only notices the deterioration of the wallpaper, but gradually envisions movement, and eventually a woman, behind the wallpaper’s mesmerizing patterns. Until which the woman with whom she had also been able to identify with, started crawling, creeping. There had been Lanser’ point that the narrator has “relentless pursuit of a single meaning on the wall” (420), although other critics have read the story as a critique of the so-called cult of true womanhood, an indictment of the medical establishment, and as a manifestation of Gilman’s now well-documented nativism. But Edelstein (2007) suggested that “The Yellow Wall-Paper” draws its symbolic strength from the imagery and iconography of yellow journalism in Gilman’s time as descriptions of the wallpaper throughout the story echo those used by the general public in reference to the turn-of-the-century tabloid. “Like the tabloid, the wallpaper is yellow, sprawling, and guilty of “committing every artistic sin” … Gilman’s emphasis on visual aesthetics in the story, as in her poem in the Forerunner , reflects the cultura