Which story is utopian and which is dystopian ?

The words utopia and dystopia are two words that can greatly describe the two short stories by Charlotte Perkins titled ” The Yellow Wallpaper and “The Cottagette”. Utopia means an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect and dystopia means the complete opposite. Dystopia means an imaginary place where people are unhappy and usually afraid because they are treated unfairly. The story “The Cottegette” is in a utopian world while ” The Yellow Wallpaper” is in a dystopia world.

Although both stories are from the view point of two different women, but each have different situations.
The short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” can be consider a dystopian world because the women is suffering from depression after the birth of her baby. Her husband orders her to stay in bad all day and do nothing as a cure for her condition. This form of treatment drives her to a state of misery. She descends into madness in which she is confined in a room with ugly yellow wallpaper.

She then turns her imagination onto the wallpaper to ignore her present state of mind. In effort to do so the narrator realize that the predicament of the women in the wallpaper is a symbolic version of her own situation.She identifies herself with the women trapped for so long in the wallpaper.The wallpaper can be a symbolic place where the narrator was trapped with no voice of her own, only the horrible patterns that she was so fixed to. This place was full with misery and unhappiness just like a dystopian world.

The short story “The Cottegette” can be considered a utopian world because the in the story it showed a women that truly loved a man and only wanted to have him to herself. They lived in a beautiful house away from everyone else. She cooked, cleaned and did everything possible to get through the man she wanted to marry. Just like the perfect utopian world, at the end of the story the guy proposed to her.

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