In “The Wife” by Emily Dickinson, the narrator talks about her past memory during her childhood how she didn’t really have the best childhood because she had to leave it all behind and give up her childhood in order to be the wife. She tells us that the idea of being a wife is like having to make a big sacrifice or just leaving behind things you couldn’t now do anymore more in all the possibilities you had in life after becoming the wife and having more responsibilities then to focus on yourself and your own life. “If aught she missed in her day of amplitude, or awe, or first prospective, or the gold in using wore away”. These lines from the poem demonstrate the wife’s curiosity and questions of what could have been her potential or possibilities. Also, it really tells us that how she isn’t really that happy in her marriage or getting married but it’s something that is not talked about during that time period of the story. “The Story of an Hour” relates to the theme of “The Wife” because of how both the women aren’t really that happy with their marriage and how that is a topic, during that point in history, that was not talked about. But the wife in “the story of an hour” is filled with new found hope of independence freedom from the women after hearing about her husband’s death. She repeats the word “free” and is now happy over the thought of living a full long life being free. Both the poem and story show how women felt about the role of being a wife and wondering the possibilities and potential they had in their own life’s way behind of their lives before becoming a wife and not having the freedom or your wishes for what you to do in your life and living free.
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3 thoughts on “Samir Ahmed Discussion 9”
I find it interesting reading your thoughts on the poems about how the characters in each story contrast with one another. In Dickinson’s story, she speaks of how her life is dreadful and all she looks forward to is living up to someone else’s standards. On the other hand, the wife in Chopin’s story feels a new lease on life, truly feeling alive for the first time in a while after the death of her husband. Before reading your post I could only see how they were similar and not how they were opposed. Thank you for that.
Hello, Samir. I personally believe that “The Wife” has a deeper feeling of dread due to its briefness. This can relate to how women of the past were married off early, which did not give them time to enjoy their lives. This is why the poem talks about pearls as they take a longer time to form, which is a metaphor for the long life of tribulations ahead while being a wife.
Hi Samir. I have the same idea as you do, neither the story nor the poem talks about how a wife enjoys the marriage. They seem they have sacrificed too much to maintain the marriage. For example, Louise loves her dead husband, at that point their marriage seems great to me. However, after I read the poem, I start to think maybe Louise had done too much for her marriage, so her marriage became a very important part of her life. That’s why she felt relief after the death of her husband.