Miss Brill, The Story of an Hour, and The Hand all demonstrate that fiction is often based on real life. In Miss Brill, we see that the voyeuristic life of a lonely woman is akin to unmarried women without families. In The Story of an Hour, We see a wife who drops dead upon finding out her thought to be dead husband is alive. She does so because she feels oppressed in a relationship where the male is always in control. In The Hand, a newly wed discovers her husband’s masculinity and potential brutality are repulsive to her since she will be kept in an inferior position because of it in the relationship. All three depict the realities of women living in a man’s world.
In Miss Brill, we see that Miss Brill is lonely. She lives life as an observer not a participant. She is like many unmarried older women who must take solace in the adventures of others and in interaction with strangers. When a band plays in a public park she notes, “It was like some one playing with only the family to listen” (1-2). We also see Miss Brill like men, such as the “fine old man” who sits next to her, but she has contempt for women who have male companionship like the wife of a patient Englishman Miss Brill “wanted to shake” (2).
In The Story of an Hour we see a woman react quite oddly to the news that her husband was killed in a train crash. As the narrator tells us: “She did not hear the story as many women would have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance” (1). The woman feels freed by the event. She sits and appreciates the trees “all aquiver with the new spring life” after hearing the news (2-3). When the woman finally makes it home she drops dead at the sight of her husband whose train has not crashed. However, she does not do so from seeing a supposedly dead man alive, but rather because she understands she will have to go back to her oppressed life with
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