The purpose of this research is to examine the portrayal of women and marriage in Chopin's The Awakening, Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," and Wharton's "Roman Fever." The plan of the research will be to set forth in general terms the distinctively female viewpoint in each of the stories, and then to discuss ways in which the line of action in each story is a critique of the received wisdom, custom, and practice of married life in general and of the experience of women in particular.
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 has relevance only because of her husband John. The opening of "Roman Fever" seems to convey a somewhat more sanguine picture of the content of elite-society marriage, but it becomes clear that life choices available to women, especially young women, of the American upper class are limited and defined by social respectability. For women of leisure the best choice was, of course, marriage. Mrs. Ansley's overhasty marriage some 25 years previously is explained by h...