Attitudes to Marriage and Women in Chopin and Gilman

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Discuss the attitudes to marriage and women in pre-1900 prose. Your answer must be based on at least 2 literary works of that era. During the pre-1900 era, feminism was rising. This engendered many writers to write about the situation that women were in at that time and which therefore seemed to advocate certain feminist beliefs and attitudes. Some of the writings can even be said to be trying to make certain feminist-related changes. In this essay, I shall attempt to determine the ideas they seem to be suggesting and the feelings they try to incite. I will use Kate Chopin’s The Story Of An Hour as well as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper as the basis of my exploration. One of the primary topics that the works of this era explore is the idea of marriage. They appear to be contending the notion that marriage is comparable to a cage where women are locked in and their freedom removed. The Story Of An Hour certainly supports this conclusion. No doubt, the moment Mrs. Mallard receives the news of her husband’s death, she goes through a “storm of grief”. Yet, the storm is short, and soon she “could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring of life” and that “there were patches of blue sky…in the west facing her window”. It is as though her husband’s death implies life and a new beginning for Mrs. Mallard. This realisation then grows into a “monstrous joy”, so that “she was striving to beat it back with her will”. She is so excited about this that “she said it over and over under her breath: ‘free, free, free!’ ” and “her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body”. All these emphasise how strong Mrs. Mallad’s emotions and craving for freedom are. Hence, Chopin is probably not just trying to say that married women are like criminals put behind bars, she is also trying to communicate a sense of blame and censure for what marriage is doing to them.Some texts go further with their negative feelings about marriage. They suggest that, in the process of being locked like birds in a cage, the women also end up ruined or destroyed. The Yellow Wallpaper, which essentially records the process of a woman going mad, is an apt example of this kind of work. It may be true that the immediate cause of the narrator’s descent into madness is her obsession with the wallpaper in her room, but there are enough clues in the text which suggest that it is marriage which drives her into her obsession with the wallpaper in the first place. Already at the beginning of the story does she believe that the wallpaper is making her condition
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worse, but she has to ask her husband for his approval first for all that she wants to do with it. Thus, it is evident that the narrator is totally under an authoritarian rule of her husband – which is essentially the cause of her madness. Whether it is to transfer to the room downstairs, to repaper the room or to leave the mansion to “make a visit to Cousin Henry and Julia”, the reply that she gets from John is always negative. This means that the narrator has no choice but to end up face-to-face with the wallpaper everyday. ...

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