Consider this possible outline for a formal essay that analyzes the context of three short stories.

Write a well-developed essay (about 800 to 1000 words or three to four pages) in which you analyze the cultural and historical context of three short stories written by women in the Progressive Era. What is the theme of these stories and how does a historical understanding of women’s position in society affect the meaning and interpretation of the stories?
See the Norton Introduction to Literature, Chapters 31 and 32, for suggestions on how to write a literary analysis. See Norton Introduction to Literature, Chapter 6 for tips on writing about symbol, and Chapter 7 for tips on writing about theme. See Chapter 9 for background about women and literature in the Progressive Era.
You must write about all three of these short stories:
Kate Chopin, “The Story of an Hour”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Susan Glaspell, “A Jury of Her Peers”
Essay Development
Suggested organization: The introduction paragraph begins with a brief discussion of relevant background about the position of women in the Progressive Era. Then the introduction paragraph ends with a thesis statement about the themes explored by women writers in their stories. This is your essay’s main claim. The body of the essay (three to six paragraphs) develops subclaims about the writers’ themes and how they used their stories to comment on the positions of women during that time in history. Finally, the conclusion paragraph sums up your discussion of the three stories by relating themes should be view in historical context.
Source Citation and Documentation
Include in your composition one or two short direct quotations from each of the three short stories that best illustrate your points about the theme. Quotations must be followed by a parenthetical citation of the page number where the quotation is found in our textbook. Also include a complete Works Cited entry in MLA style for the authors and short stories as they appear in our literature textbook, following the examples for, “Works in an Anthology” and “Two or More Works from One Anthology” in the Little Seagull Handbook or any MLA style guide. Do not use EasyBib or other automated citation generator.
Also include in your composition information about the status of women during the time these stories were written by citing the introductory material and excerpts in Chapter 9 and in any of the three overview articles from Short Stories for Students. Create a works cited entry for Chapter 9 excerpts the same way you do for the short stories. Create a works cited entry for the overview articles by copying and pasting the MLA works cited information automatically generated by the database at the bottom of the article.
Guidelines for a Contextual Analysis Essay
In general, the point of a contextual analysis essay is to show how the cultural and historical context of a short story reveals a specific understanding of the short story. For example, when readers understand that in Chopin’s time, women had no career possibilities other than being a housewife, it becomes clear that Mrs. Mallard’s fatal heart trouble is not simply because of the unexpected news of her husband’s death or his shocking return; rather it is because of the limited opportunities society allowed women at that time in history.
Thesis and Topic Sentences
In a literary analysis essay, the thesis is your main claim, and the topic sentences of each body paragraph are your supporting subclaims. Your essay should have an explicitly stated thesis as the last sentence of the introduction paragraph. Your essay should also have explicitly stated topic sentences as the first sentence of each body paragraph. The thesis statement should be explicitly related to the topic sentences, and all the topic sentences should be explicitly related to each other. Use transitional words and expressions where necessary to show relationships between the main and supporting ideas of your essay.
The cultural and historical context of these three stories reveals that women writers at this time were concerned with at society that limited women’s happiness, independence, and self-determination.
Outline
Consider this possible outline for a formal essay that analyzes the context of three short stories.
An introduction that gives some background about the social position of women in the Progressive Era. Cite the introduction and excerpts from Chapter 9 or the short story overview articles. Give the three writers as examples. Then ends with a thesis about hot the common themes are revealed by contextual analysis. For example:
The cultural and historical context of stories by Chopin, Gilman, and Glaspell reveals that women writers at this time were concerned with an unequal society that limited women’s happiness, independence, and self-determination.
Organize the body of the essay either by story or by theme. Either each body paragraph focuses on one of the stories and gives examples of how that story involves various themes, or each body paragraph focuses on a different theme and gives examples that theme from each story.
Conclude your essay by summarizing how the three writers commented on the society of their time through the themes in their stories.
Paragraph Development and Organization
The introduction paragraph can be developed with information from the secondary sources in Chapter 9 and Short Stories for Students overview articles. Since these sources are not works of literature, you do not need to give direct quotations or mention their authors; instead, you can paraphrase the source and give a parenthetical in-text citation.
Each body paragraph should begin with an explicitly stated topic sentence that presents one of the subclaims that will prove your thesis. The topic sentence is not just a statement of the topic of the paragraph, but a statement of a complete idea; it includes both the topic and your point about that topic in the same sentence. All the other sentences in the paragraph give details to support your topic sentence. The details include description, summary, paraphrase, and direct quotations from the story. The sentences are connected by transitions where necessary to show relationships between the ideas of each sentence within the paragraph. You should use the last name of the story’s author often in your sentences, to distinguish between your own ideas and the ideas from the story.
Avoid starting your body paragraphs with a sentence that seems like a detail of the story. Each body paragraph should begin with a subclaim about an element of the story, followed up by supporting examples and details from the story. Each body paragraph should end with a concluding sentence to point out how the subclaim contributes to your thesis.
In-Text Citations
All the words and ideas in your essay are assumed to be originally your own. If you write about the ideas and quote the words of other writers, MLA style requires that you cite them with the name of the author and the page number where the words or ideas are published. You can cite the original author’s name and the page number in two ways. One way is to use the author’s name in your sentence to introduce the idea or the quoted words and giving the page number in parenthesis at the end of your sentence. The other way is to give both the author’s last name and the page number in parenthesis at the end of your sentence.
For this assignment, you are discussing the creative work of three literary authors and the scholarly work of secondary sources. You will use the full names of the authors in your introduction, so you will need to use only the author’s last name throughout the remainder of your essay. As you discuss the short stories, you should use the author’s name often to distinguish between your own analytical statements about the stories, on one hand, and your description, summary, paraphrase, or quotation of the original author’s words, on the other hand.
In this essay assignment, since you are going to be using the author’s name frequently in your sentences, your direct quotations of the author’s words need to be cited with a page number in parentheses at the end of your sentence (Gilman 571).
When using MLA style, do not include the word “page” or its abbreviations “pg.” or “p.” in the parenthetical in-text citation because any number by itself is assumed to be a page number.
When you cite the information from Chapter 9, give the last name of the textbook editor and the page number (Mays 564). When you cite the article from Short Stories for Students, give the shortened article title in quotation marks in your parenthetical in-text citation (“Jury”).
Works Cited Page
MLA style requires that you include a list of all the authors whose work you cited in your essay. Since this essay is about three short stories by three authors from the textbook, and also requires at least one secondary source, your Works Cited page will need four or five entries.
Format
Format your paragraph according to MLA style using Microsoft Word. Open the pre-formatted Microsoft Word MLA style template and notice the formatting details, then replace the existing text with your own writing. Refer to pages 158-160 in the Little Seagull Handbook for specifications of MLA style format. Notice these details of the format:
Name, course, title. In the upper left-hand corner of your first page, include your name, your professor’s name, the name of the course, and the date. Center the title of your paper on the line after the date; capitalize it as you would a book title.
Page numbers. In the upper right-had corner of each page, one-half inch below the top of the page, include your last name and the page number. Number pages consecutively throughout your paper.
Font, spacing, margins, and indents. Choose font Times New Roman, size 12pt, which is easy to read and provides a clear contrast between regular and italic text. Double-space the entire paper. Set one-inch margins at the top, bottom, and sides of your text; do not justify your text. The first line of each paragraph should be indented one-half inch from the left margin.
List of Works Cited. Start your list on a new page. Center the title and double space the entire list. Begin each entry at the margin and ident subsequent line of the same entry one-half inch. Alphabetize the list by the first word in each entry (which is usually the author’s last name).
THESE ARE THE 3 SHORT STORIES THE ESSAY IS OVER …
https://my.hrw.com/support/hos/hostpdf/host_text_219.pdf
https://learning.hccs.edu/faculty/selena.anderson/engl2328/readings/the-yellow-wallpaper-by-charlotte-perkins-gilman/view
https://nmi.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/1345.pdf