There is a complex connection between marriage and physical health. Whether you are happily married or not, there will be a positive or negative effect of the marriage. Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen” presents the idea of modern day marriage from a feminine perspective as not just "a failure in intelligence" (p. 251 Women in Fiction) but also a form of bondage from which one must escape at all costs. Marriage seems as the metric by which the dominant cultural beliefs measures their standards.
Doris Lessing, a creative writer, takes great care to establish the social, economic and intellectual prowess of Matthew and Susan Rawlings. She describes them as a sensible middle class couple "to whom others would come for advice" (p. 251/ Paragraph
…show more content…
"Both Susan and Matthew had moments of thinking so, of looking in secret disbelief at this thing they had created: marriage, four children... (p. 253, Para. 3).
Their paths to self-discovery diverge as, according to Rula Quawas dissertation on the text, "in her internal quest for authentic selfhood,” she finds a gap between the dominant cultural ideology or her social role as woman and her own lived experience as a woman. She slips into de Lauretis' "chinks and cracks", into the other consciousness which she finally recognizes the culture would consider mad."
Meanwhile Matthew threatens what Susan has come to regard as the center around which the extraordinary structure that was their marriage revolved. His confession to the Myra Jennings affair widened the chinks as Susan spirals through her quest. There were lots of resentment in the marriage. Susan internalized everything which drove her insane. Matthew's contribution to her deepening psychosis was when he confessed to having an affair. Matthew was like the society he represents, failed to see beyond the very frills, even though he realizes his marriage was lacking, his quest for self-discovery led to extramarital affairs. This extramarital affair served as a
…show more content…
She didn’t want to tell her hurt her family so she coped with her condition. The inability to connect the hidden feeling led her to isolation. She yawns for her freedom, as Doris Lessing stated in “To room nineteen”, “she possessed with resentment that seven hours of freedom in every day were not free” (P. 263/Par. 4).
Duncan-Richards 5
Susan struggled to get out of the culturally defined norms in the society. She wanted her marriage to be different but instead it wasn’t. Her traditional marriage drove her insane. Her marriage was lack of communication which caused her to distance herself from her family secretly. She escaped to room nineteen as Ozsert , S (2004) “A Passage to Freedom” stated by Khun Zhao (2012) the room is “a shelter from housework, children and unfaithful husband.
In conclusion, one can lose their self in a marriage, more so the woman. Sometimes you get involved with a person and end up marrying to them, then the relationship changed. The story showed an independent woman who give up everything for her family and had no time for herself. It pushed her to committing suicide which was the only way she could've freed herself. The lack of communication in a marriage can cause each partner to resent each other which was the case in the story of “To room
Lauren Alleyne uses the rigid form of the sonnet to navigate through the healing process after being sexually assaulted. Ten years after that night, she writes the sonnet sequence Eighteen, which deviates from the typical sonnet form in the aspects of the speaker, subject, and format. Playing off of the standard sonnet form, Alleyne is able to recount the emotions of that night during the first sonnet in the sequence. The typical sonnet tends to objectify the female body or one’s lover; in this sequence, the sonnets address what happens when an individual acts on these objectifications and assaults Alleyne. Alleyne deviates from the standard subject and speaker of the typical sonnet form to begin the healing process; the process begins
Susan Leigh Vaughan Smith was born September 26, 1971 in Union, South Carolina to Linda and Harry Vaughan. She was born the third child in the Vaughan family, with two older brothers. Linda Vaughan divorced Harry when Susan turned 7, and five weeks later Harry committed suicide at 37 (Montaldo). Within weeks of Linda and Harry’s divorce, Linda got remarried to Beverly (Bev) Russell, a local successful businessman. Linda and the children moved from their home into Bev’s, a larger house located in an exclusive subdivision in Union, South Carolina. Susan grew to be a well-liked teenager, and even became president of her Junior Civitan Club and Friendliest Female in her senior year (Montaldo). Everyone liked her, and she put on a great show at school. But after the last bell rang, she had to look forward to seeing Bev at home, something she feared above anything else. Bev had taken to molesting Susan when she turned sixteen, and it was not long afterward that she sought help with the local Department of Social Services (Wiki). The Department of Social services did little to help Susan, only making Bev attend a few counseling sessions (Wiki). When he returned home, he chastised Susan heavily for “airing their dirty laundry in public” and continued with the molestation (Montaldo). I believe thi...
Kate Chopin’s “The Story of the Hour” and Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” are viewed from a woman’s perspective in the nineteenth century. They show the issues on how they are confined to the house. That they are to be stay at home wives and let the husband earn the household income. These stories are both written by American women and how their marriage was brought about. Their husbands were very controlling and treated them more like children instead of their wives. In the nineteenth century their behavior was considered normal at the time. In “The Story of the Hour” and “The Yellow Wallpaper,” both women explore their issues on wanting to be free from the control of their husband’s.
Kate Chopin’s “The Story of the Hour” and Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is viewed from a woman’s perspective of the nineteenth century. They showed the issues on how they were confined to the house. That they were to be stay at home wives and let the husband earn the household income. These stories are both written by American women and how their marriage was brought about. Their husbands were very controlling and treated them more like children instead of their wives. In the nineteenth century their behavior was considered normal at the time. In “The Story of the Hour” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” both women explore their issues on wanting to be free of the control of their husband.
There is no one to listen to her or care for her ‘personal’ opinions. Her husband cares for her, in a doctor’s fashion, but her doesn’t listen to her (Rao, 39). Dealing with a mentally ill patient can be difficult, however, it’s extremely inappropriate for her husband to be her doctor when he has a much larger job to fulfill. He solely treats his wife as a patient telling her only what could benefit her mental sickness rather than providing her with the companionship and support she desperately needs. If her husband would have communicated with her on a personal level, her insanity episode could have been prevented. Instead of telling her everything she needed he should’ve been there to listen and hear her out. Instead she had to seek an alternate audience, being her journal in which he then forbids her to do. All of this leads to the woman having nobody to speak or express emotion to. All of her deep and insane thoughts now fluttered through her head like bats in the Crystal Cave.
Marriage is a commitment that seems to be getting harder to keep. The social standards placed on an individual by society and influenced by the media inevitably lead some to consider divorce as a “quick-fix” option. “Have it your way” has become a motto in the United States. It has become a country without any consideration of the psychological effects of marriage and divorce. The overwhelmingly high divorce rate is caused by a lack of moral beliefs and marital expectations.
In “The Yellow Wall-paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the unnamed female protagonist is going through a rough time in her life. (For now on, this paper will refer to this unnamed character as the “the narrator in ‘Wall-paper,’” short for “The Yellow Wall-paper. The narrator is confined to room to a room with strange wall-paper. This odd wall-paper seems to symbolize the complexity and confusion in her life. In “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, the protagonist, Mrs. Mallard must also deal with conflict as she must deal with the death of her spouse. At first there is grief, but then there is the recognition that she will be free. The institute of marriage ties the two heroines of these two short stories together. Like typical young women of the late 19th century, they were married, and during the course of their lives, they were expected to stay married. Unlike today where divorce is commonplace, marriage was a very holy bond and divorce was taboo. This tight bond of marriage caused tension in these two characters.
The story begins when she and her husband have just moved into a colonial mansion to relieve her chronic nervousness. An ailment her husband has conveniently diagnosed. The husband is a physician and in the beginning of her writing she has nothing but good things to say about him, which is very obedient of her. She speaks of her husband as if he is a father figure and nothing like an equal, which is so important in a relationship. She writes, "He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction." It is in this manner that she first delicately speaks of his total control over her without meaning to and how she has no choices whatsoever. This control is perhaps so imbedded in our main character that it is even seen in her secret writing; "John says the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition...so I will let it alone and talk about the house." Her husband suggests enormous amounts of bed rest and no human interaction at all. He chooses a "prison-like" room for them to reside in that he anticipates will calm our main character even more into a comma like life but instead awakens her and slowly but surely opens her eyes to a woman tearing the walls down to freedom.
Her family life is depicted with contradictions of order and chaos, love and animosity, conventionality and avant-garde. Although the underlying story of her father’s dark secret was troubling, it lends itself to a better understanding of the family dynamics and what was normal for her family. The author doesn’t seem to suggest that her father’s behavior was acceptable or even tolerable. However, the ending of this excerpt leaves the reader with an undeniable sense that the author felt a connection to her father even if it wasn’t one that was desirable. This is best understood with her reaction to his suicide when she states, “But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb.” (pg. 399)
An Analysis of Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper
Susan, the protagonist in “To Room Nineteen” feels trapped by her life and her family, and afflicted by her husband’s infidelity. Everyone assumes Susan and her husband are the perfect couple who have made all the right choices in life, but when Susan packs her youngest children off to school and discovers that her husband has been having an affair, she begins to question the life decisions she has made. Susan chooses to isolate herself from her own family by embarking on a journey of self-discovery in a hotel room that ultimately becomes a descend into madness. Unlike Susan, the woman in “The Yellow Wallpaper” initially wants contact and interaction with people, but is
The narrator’s journey into insanity is caused by her husband isolating her from societal influences and also the long period of time in which she was imprisoned without anything or anyone to stimulate her intellect. While some critics may claim that she was insane upon entering the mansion, it is clear that she was able to think and reason well and be able to hypothesize during the first few weeks of her confinement. By feeling demoralized and useless in the presence of her husband, and also not being able to vocalize her own treatment options, she slowly became the incompetent women that needed her husband to dictate her life. In the end, she escaped the realism that she felt was holding her from expressing herself and became an individual not scared to express what she was to her husband.
Marriage can be seen as a subtle form of oppression, like many things which are dictated by social expectations. In Kate Chopin’s The Story of An Hour, Louise Mallard finds herself in distress due to the event of her husband’s death that makes her question who she is as a person. The author cleverly uses this event to create the right atmosphere for Mrs. Mallard to fight against her own mind. As the short story progresses, we see that Mrs. Mallard moves forward with her new life and finds peace in her decision to live for herself. This shows that marriage too is another chain that holds oneself back. Not wanting to admit this to herself, Louise
Marriage was once for the sole purpose of procreation and financially intensives. Living up to the roles that society had placed on married couples, more so women, is no longer the goal in marriage. Being emotional satisfied, having a fulfilled sex life and earning money is more important in marriage (Cherlin, 2013). Couples no longer feel the obligation to put the needs of their partner in front of their own needs. In the 1960’s and later it was the woman’s job to ensure that the house was clean, the children were bathed and dinner was prepared before the husband came home work. However, once more and more women began to enter the workplace and gain more independence, a desire for self-development and shared roles in the household lead way the individualistic marriage that is present in today’s society (Cherlin,
Now that we have a little background on the author, we can take a closer look at the actual work and its characters. The two main characters of the story a narrator and her husband, John, and the story takes place in the 19th century. Life for the two is like most other marriages in this time frame, only the narrator is not like most other wives. She has this inner desire to be free from the societal roles that confine her and to focus on her writing, while John in content with his life and thinks that his wife overreacts to everything. Traditionally, in this era, the man was responsible for taking care of the woman both financially and emotionally, while the woman was solely responsible for remaining at home. This w...