Wharton and Gilman

Wharton's "The Other Two" is a very thought-provoking short story about intimacy and the marital bond itself.  I found it well written, packed with great detail and good dialogue; very efficient and multi-layered.
The part I found most interesting was the way Mr. Waythorn went from being the jealous, insecure husband to feeling obliged to and comforted by his wifes' ex-husbands(Haskett 1st, Varick 2nd). He, it seems to me, began to accept the unmovable past, show maturity and, actually, value his wife's life experience despite comparing her to a "bowling shoe"!?(mine, not Wharton's).

Gilman, part of the able Beecher line (Lyman, Harriet, Catherine) who had deep roots in the Cincinnati and SW Ohio area, wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper" which can be best desribed simply, as "haunting". As someone who has done a fair bit of home remodeling can atest, I have found the process of  removing ugly wallpaper(whether the pattern looks like "torture" or not) to be among the most tedious.  The narrator in this story is dealing with a depression or psychosis that is spiraling to darker bowels of her brain as the story progresses.  After reading the intro to Gilman, it seems that this story is probably very autobiographical and, one can only hope, somewhat therapeutic as well.  The husband, John, a medical doctor, is patriarchal and overbearing to a flaw despite his seemingly genuine concern for his sick wife. Medicine in the 1890's was still very crude(antibiotics or "germ therapy" was just starting to be tested); not to mention the fact that Postpartum depression is still not very well understood and to some extent still talked about almost as a taboo subject.  This, in  my opinion, just adds to the horror of this story; knowing that Dr. John was exacerbating his wife's illness with his dictatorial prescriptions. In the end,  she was stricken and confined not only by her clinical depression but also by "The Man-Made World" in which she lived.