In “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and “The Darling” by Anton Chekhov, we are introduced to main characters whose lives are surrounded by control. In Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," the main character, who remains anonymous, is controlled by her husband, John. He tells her what she is allowed to do and what she is not allowed to do, where she must live, i.e. she is not allowed to see her own child . In Chekhov's "The Sweetheart", the main character, Olenka, allows her own opinions and thoughts to be those of those close to her. When John puts the narrator in the room, she writes despite him telling her she shouldn't. At the end of her first passage, the narrator tells us: "Here's John, and I have to put this away - he hates it when I write him a note." The narrator was told that writing and any other intellectual activity would exhaust her. The only thing that exhausts him is hiding it from them. The narrator tells us: “I wrote for a while in spite of them; but it wears me out a lot - having to be so sneaky, lest I encounter strong opposition.” Conrad Shumaker suggests that John believes that if someone uses too much imagination, they will not be able to understand reality. "He fears that because of her imaginative "temperament" she will create the fiction that she is crazy and end up accepting it despite the evidence - color, weight, appetite - that she is fine. Imagination and l "art are subversive because they threaten to undermine his materialist universe." In Gilman's "Why I Wrote Yellow Wallpaper," Gilman tells us that when she was sent home from her rest cure, Dr. Mitchell gave her "solemn advice to 'live such a domestic life as possible", having only two intellectual hours... in the middle of a diary......lf. When Olenka was alone, "she had no opinions of any kind. She saw the objects around from her and understood what she saw, but could not form any opinion about them and did not know what to talk about "Olenka had nothing to do with the conversation and if she wanted to make conversation, she did not. could not give his opinion. In conclusion, both women had a strong control factor in their lives. In "The Yellow Wallpaper", the main character does not make any decisions of his own. Her husband, John, controls everything she does. The environment of her life controls all of Olenka's opinions. Men don't want it to be that way, but that's exactly how Olenka allows herself to not be able to think for herself. These characters both have similar personalities. control themselves throughout their lives.