Women & Marriage in Chopin & Wharton

Each writer in her way portrays marriage among the more or less socially privileged circles of fin de siFcle American experience. Chopin's focus on the elite of Louisiana may at first seem to be highly regionalist in orientation, but Edna's psychological experience of a definite lack of a right to a new (or anyway distinctive) social identity as a woman in a world not of her making is of far more decisive importance than the fact that she feels as she does in the genteel delta South. Like Edna, the young wife in "The Yellow Wallpaper" feels disaffected from home and family. Initially, the problem appears to be prolonged post-partum depression, and she has passively acquiesced in being nursed, just as Edna Pontellier passively submits to the social conventions of New Orleans creole society. But at least Edna has a confidante in her best creole lady friend; the wife in "The Yellow Wallpaper" can confide in no one. Indeed, Gilman does not name the wife. She is reduced to a cultural stereotype that h

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s the wallpaper, which will not change because he anticipates her decorative caprice: "the heavy bedstead, and then the barred windows, and then that gate at the head of the stairs, and so on" (Gilman 673). The wife's fruitless attempts to be heard in her own household are "heard" by a husband who reads her mind and knows everything about her. To be sure, he is solicitous of her, but she is an afterthought, marginalized by the fact and content of his concern: "You know the place is doing you good," he says to his "blessed little goose" (Gilman 673). John's paternalism is amplified by his social standing as a physician, and part of the wife's challenge is to overcome what she has internalized as received wisdom. It is difficult not to suspect that John would not be so insistent about the room in which the patient would recover were that patient not his wife. In other words, marriage confers on him a unique sense of entitlement and a unique deafness to patient needs. On her, marriage confers special obligations Accordingly, John's wife must not be seen writing, must not exert herself, must get well for him, for she is "his comfort and all he had, and . . . I must take care of myself for his sake" (Gilman 676). It is but a short step
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Approximate Word count = 1534
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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