A Critique of Paradise Lost (Domestic Division) by TERRY MARTIN HEKKER - Essay Example

Critique of Paradise Lost (Domestic Division) The article en d Paradise Lost by Terry Martin Hekker about her unexpected and painful divorce from her husband of forty years argues that indeed being a good housewife and housekeeper doesn’t guarantee a woman from losing a “tenured position” of being a wife. Hekker, two and a half decades back was riding on the crest on her success as a recognized author and spokesperson for women who happily chose the duties of a wife and mother over careers at a time when feminism was at its peak.

The current article is quite honest in its personal portrayal of a woman who felt abandoned by her husband. But in its efforts to tie in the author’s experience with the greater debate on women’s choices regarding family and career, the article offers nothing really new except probably with the shocking revelation that even women into their 60s, almost forever married by today’s standards could still be dumped by their husbands. Furthermore, some of the arguments pertaining to the debate tend to be contradictory or ambivalent.

Hekker succeeds in making a significant emotional pitch for presenting herself as a cautionary tale of a woman who though, already in her four decades of marriage and well into her senior years could still be discarded by her husband with all the emotional and financial hardships of dealing with the aftermath. The article mostly centers on her case alone, and in a passing reference, to those of her two friends who were also divorced by their husbands and which she remarkably noted that among them, “they’d been married for 110 years”.

What makes the article even more poignant is that the author wryly compared herself and her friends to “outdated kitchen appliances”: “Like them”, she wrote, “we were serviceable, low maintenance, front loading, self-cleaning and (relatively) frost free. Also like them we had warranties that had run out. Our husbands sought sleeker models with features we lacked who could execute tasks wed either never learned or couldnt perform without laughing.” It is indeed quite shocking and repulsive to note that there are men, for example the author’s ex-husband who could treat a marriage of forty long years like it was nothing – although the husband’s reasons for leaving the marriage are not revealed to the readers, the sympathy goes to the author who watched herself struggled financially while her husband gallivanted with his new wife in Mexico.

However the article’s main strength which is its emotional appeal of how men could abandon women also revealed its weakness of unwittingly portraying women as being merely passive creatures as it repeatedly drove home the point that women who get divorced, are in effect, being discarded, abandoned by their husbands. Not in one instance in the article did the author point out that if a divorce takes place, there might other be reasons for it – such as women, also abandoning their marriages, or couples mutually deciding to do so for some other reasons.

Also since the article focused on the experience of the author as an abandoned wife, her belated exhortations for women to have careers while rearing their families seemed a little off with her other observations on the plight of women today. She wrote that she would still do what she did except “I would have used the years after my youngest started school to further my education” – at the same time she wrote, “I read about the young mothers of today - educated, employed, self-sufficient - who drop out of the work force when they have children, and I worry and wonder.

Perhaps it is the right choice for them. Maybe theyll be fine. But the fragility of modern marriage suggests that at least half of them may not be.” The statistic “half of them” does not have any bearing on her case, as she has not really given facts and data to back up this claim – nor did she defined by what she meant by “they’ll be fine”. Again, the specter she raises here is that women will be divorced, women will get abandoned – a passive state from which women are always on the losing end.

When a couple gets divorced, usually there are two people involved – that is, in effect, both get divorced. This article is a good read in its personal portrayal of a woman who in her senior years and decades of marriage was unexpectedly divorced by her husband. It is a cautionary tale by the author that women need to take care of themselves financially, in effect, get a career and must not let their fortunes be singularly tied to their husbands and their children. However the weaknesses of the article is that its argument for having a career for women is driven by fears of abandonment and not by positive or embracing need to have a life, or work outside that of the family – that is, the author failed to identify career as a source of fulfillment, not merely as a defense or security option in case the husband and children fail to measure up.