A lot of the same themes from the short stories are in A Doll's House. Nora, suffers from the same afflictions as the heroines of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Chrysanthemums,” such as isolation, inequality, and lack of identity. The settings of the stories are a microcosm of the world women must live in and the opportunities available to them. The wife in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is trapped in an asylum much the same way Nora is confined to her living room and Elisa in her garden. They are masters of their environment. It is the only place they have any control in their lives. John’s wife becomes obsessed with the room when she is deprived of any stimulation. Ibsen’s play is set exclusively in the Helmer living room which is where Torvald would like to keep Nora forever if he could.
The men in Ibsen’s play and Gilman’s short story are products of their time and are seen as the system of values that need change. Both Torvald and John share an intense narcissism that upon first sight the reader fails to identify it. The characters see themselves as protectors, doing what is best for their wives, but their intentions are purely self-motivated.
In all three stories the main characters are dependent on a male character feeding into the popular fallacy that defined a woman as being motivated by an unconscious desire to be taken care of as a fear of independence. This is exactly the role the women in the stories are expected to fulfill. They play the part, but show the hollowness of such an ideal at the end when Nora, realizing she is nothing more than an object leaves her family, and the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” goes insane.
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