“The wife” by Emily Dickinson and “The story of an Hour?” by Kate Chopin are both short pieces that highlight the inequality faced by women, especially married women. They both have a reoccurring theme of the dysfunctional relationship between husband and wife. In the third stanza of “the wife” it says “But only to himself is known the fathoms they abide.” I believe that this means that the husband is the only one that knows what their wife goes through on a day-to-day basis and at the same time it means that they don’t know the depth of what their wife actually goes through especially during the times the poem and short story was written as women had much less rights than they do today. This is especially noted when Ms. Mallard dies when she finds out her husband is alive as all her hopes and dreams of being freed from married life are instantly crushed. It shows how their relationship was so dysfunctional and how Ms. Mallard hated it so much that she would rather die than go back to her husband.
Daily Archives: October 23, 2022
The theme in Emily Dickinson’s “The Wife” relates to Mrs. Mallard’s emotional state in “The Story of an Hour” by using the theme of oppressiveness within marriage. In “The Wife”, there is a lack of independence within marriage. In “The Wife”, line 1 starts off with “She rose to his requirement, dropped” (Dickinson). I find this quote shows the lack of bodily autonomy, relating to how Mrs. Mallard felt during her marriage. In lines 3 to 4, the text states, “To take the honorable work Of woman and of a wife.” (Dickinson). Dickson uses the two words woman and wife to mean very different things. You have to give up a part of yourself being a woman to become a wife, losing a part of yourself you once were to be a wife. The poem highlights the reality of how women are overlooked and their own identities are stripped away from them within marriages to please their husbands. In paragraphs 8 through 10 in “The Story of an Hour”, Chopin writes, “But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought. There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully… as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: “free, free, free!” (Chopin). Her husband’s death though shocking at first gave her a sense of independence. Normally a wife would be portrayed as devastating hearing their husband is dead but focusing on the societal expectations of a wife around that time period, […]
The Author Flannery O’Connor, in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” demonstrates the transformative power of human compassion and grace. Transformations of the two-character stereotypes, which the grandmother and the Misfit embody, are used to get across the story’s message. By allowing the stereotypes to evolve into round characters with the potential to change, the author demonstrates that anyone can change through the presence of grace. The grandmother represents the stereotypical southern, Christian, domineering mother who is often hypocritical and two-faced. She is flawed and annoying from the start, and more than anyone else is responsible for the family’s terrible problem. While she considers herself a “lady” and morally superior to others, she freely and frequently passes judgment on others without inspecting her own hypocrisy, selfishness, and dishonesty. She also takes any opportunity to judge the lack of goodness in people. The Misfit is described as the stereotypical criminal and more specifically, an ignorant, someone who has gone wrong in life. It is hard to empathize with him, especially after he kills the grandmother’s family in such a casual manner. The Misfit carries on a philosophical conversation with the grandmother, explaining that he doesn’t view actions as right or wrong and that if he does something that others consider wrong, he gets punished. Both characters, by the time of their final face, feel profound changes. Only when the grandmother faces death does she realize where she has gone wrong in life. Instead of acting superior like she has throughout the story, she recognizes that she is flawed like everyone else. She sees that both she and the Misfit are the same at their core they are sinners in need of grace. By seeing the murderer as “one of my own children!”, the grandmother offers him unconditional love and acceptance […]
In the poem “the Wife” by Emily Dickinson, the main theme is the self-realization of being a full-on wife. She realized that to meet her husband’s “demands” she has to change her original life and fully support and devote herself as her husband’s wife. In “The Wife”, the author states in the text, “She rose to his requirement, dropped The playthings of her life To take the honorable work Of woman and of wife.” Mrs. Mallard realized after finding out her husband is dead, she finally feels that she is “free” and can live how she used to. The two readings both have the theme of realization, In “The Wife”. The wife realizes that she has to drop everything from her life to be devoted to her husband. During Mrs. Mallard’s emotional state, she realizes that she feels “free” to do things how she used to after her husband dies.
