Compare and contrast "The Yellow Wallpaper" and The Awakening.

Both of these stories take place right around the same time period: the very end of the nineteenth century. Both texts have a female protagonist who is very much at the mercy of her society and her husband, as the agent of society. However, ultimately, one woman is driven crazy by her confinement to her home while the other escapes her home and ultimately finds some triumph in her willingness to give up her life but not her self.

The narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" likely suffers from postpartum depression after the birth of her son, and her husband, a doctor, has confined her to the top floor of a house evidently designed for the recuperation of someone like her (there are bars on the window, the bed is nailed down, there's a gate at the top of the steps, etc). Edna Pontellier likely suffers from depression as she realizes that she is unhappy with her husband and actually loves another man, Robert Lebrun.

The condition of the narrator in "The Yellow Wallpaper" is exacerbated by her "treatment"—a total lack of work or company or mental stimulation of any kind (she is supposed to rest only)—and Edna's condition is likewise worsened by her relative confinement to her home in New Orleans after the comparative freedom she experienced in Grand Isle. Both women seek, and need, a way to feel as though they can exist outside of their confinements, and so Edna moves to her "pigeon house" while her husband is away, and the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" imagines that there is a woman trapped in her wallpaper who she can help to set free and thus retain some power and control over her own feelings of being trapped and controlled.

Ultimately, the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" experiences a complete mental break, imagining that she is the woman from the wallpaper and that she has been set free, and Edna does not experience such a break. Instead, Edna makes a conscious decision based on information she has already shared with Adele Ratignolle earlier in the text.  She said that she'd be willing to give her life for her children but not her self, not the "essential," she called it. In the end, she does preserve her self, though not her life. She knows that there is no way to have what she really wants—a life of freedom that she can share equally with the man she loves—and, unwilling to compromise or settle for less, she decides to exit society entirely by dying in a manner that empowers her.