There is a resembles between “The Yellow Wallpaper” and “Fight Club”. The society in both stories represent the society as a confinement to their inner selves. For example, the movie “Fight Club” is about a man who is stuck in his mundane life that only consists of work and sleep. He strives to escape this life that was place upon him by society’s standards. He fantasizes his escape from society by imagining his alternate self by creating a separate character. Similarly to “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the main character is a women who is stuck in a patriarchal society placed is upon her. She strives to break free from its imprisonment. She too also imagines her alternate self within a women, who she imagines as her separate self, that is breaking from from the imprisonment she is placed into by her societal standards.
The discussion of gender roles is very prevalent within both stories. For example, both main characters are male and female who have separate issues in the constructed societal expectations that negatively impact both genders. The male main character within “Fight Club” is expected by society to work his life away because it is seen as masculine. He struggles with that internal conflict of not meeting the expectations of masculinity as a male. His alternate self he illusions is a strong character that starts a fight club to overcome seeming weak. The female character within “The Yellow Wallpaper” is expected to conform to being infantilized, overlooked, and being treated as weak by men. The belief of what femininity is the complete opposite of masculinity. Being considered strong or independent is off the menu for women because women live as inferior to men. The female main character struggles with conforming to this reality and expresses her freedom through the insanity of her illusions of a sperate women within the wallpaper of her room she is isolated into.
I believe both pieces reference both of the main characters as someone who crave an escape to be free from the imprisonment of their reality. The crave for an escape is strong enough to create mental illusions of that free life through a separate character they envision as themselves.