The Impact of Stereotypical Gender Roles - Essay Example

? The Impact of Stereotypical Gender Roles The role of woman was typically determined and assigned by men before the twentieth century. It was mainlythe middle class women who were mostly affected by this system of male dominion. The women folk were caged in an ideological prison that subjugated and silenced them. The practice of domesticity along with the cult of purity was put forward as the ultimate goal of women and the main components of true womanhood. Women served only the domestic needs of the family, as they were almost imprisoned within the private sphere. Again the verdict of purity somehow compelled them to remain virtuous and pure both before and after marriage. One of these virtues was modesty that needed to have a continuous presence in women. Along with these came the peripheral parts of the ideology, that is, religious piety and submission. The male section enjoyed more freedom and flexibility in the social structure. On one hand men enjoyed the goodies from the private life where they got the nurture of the women as well as the due authoritative position. On the other hand they reaped the benefits of freedom in the public domain. They acquired an identity of their own in the society through competitive market interaction. However the women were induced to be immobile through exploitation of their biological framework, which made them believe that they could not enter the public sphere where they did not belong. The lives of women were supposed to ensure service for the welfare of the family and persevere social stability at the same time. Apart from this there was sexual repression and women had to accept whatever their marital relations had in store. In this context women could be called emotional servants. Coming to the aristocrats the expectations from the women was different from the middle class people. She was expected to behave in a certain manner and choose her groom from a certain social stratum. The paper attempts to analyze three stories, “Story of an Hour”, “Trifles” and “A rose for Emily”, connected by the common theme of death, to present the roles played by women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and the consequences led by the same. Susan Glaspell’s ‘Trifles’ shows how women have utilized the concept regarding their traditional position in the society to their advantage. While the men disregard the discussion of women as unimportant, the two women, Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters discover the mystery of the murder, which the sheriff and Mr. Hale come to investigate. They are looking for evidence against Mrs. Wright, the farmer’s wife suspected for killing her husband. The women in course of their search discover some strong evidence against the wife of the farmer but at the same time their empathy for the woman who was strongly dominated and psychologically tormented by her husband gets the better of their honesty. The two men initially laughs as they find the women pondering over the actions of Mrs. Wright and Mr. Hale comments with ridicule, “They wonder if she was going to quilt it or just knot it” (Glaspell) and both men laugh. However at the end of the play when the women finally discover that Mrs. Wright was actually going to ‘knot it’ they keep it hidden from the men very carefully. The farmer dies of a rope around his neck. Here the missing links of the case are the motive and some strong evidence. The women find the motive, but before the men enter the room they quickly hide the evidence (a parrot, Mrs. Wright’s favorite, killed in the same manner as the farmer) and talk as if nothing important has been found. The men who were already taking the women’s abilities very lightly do not suspect anything mysterious. Not necessarily through words, but via gestures, and mainly through silence, they keep the most important thing hidden from their husbands, especially that which would have helped them in their work. The main problem, however, lay with the underestimation of the women in the men’s eyes, which made this easier for the women to hide the details they discovered. The women have their reason, the bigger cause of rendering justice to the woman who had to bear a lot of hardships from her husband. The story also unravels that Mrs. Wright, despite being a good singer, was never allowed to practice music after marriage just like most women were not allowed to practice their talents. The murder of the parrot here signifies the metaphor of her husband’s physical death as both are killed in the same way. Death here is symbolic as tying a rope around the neck signifies suffocation and inability to breathe freely, an experience which Mrs. Wright was going through in the presence of her husband. ‘The Story of An Hour’ by the American writer Kate Chopin talks about the central character Mrs. Mallard’s reaction and mental transformation on hearing the news of her husband’s death and the mix of emotions experienced by the frail woman. Widowhood does cause some sorrow but within minutes it brings forth a new opportunity and light to the journey of life. The transformation in thoughts and a feeling of some kind of freedom gradually replaces the initial feeling of loss. The author intends to cast an eye of critic at the very institution of marriage, which is supposed to be a bond of love to be shared between two people and uses some remarkable symbolism to achieve this end. Society normally expects a wife to shed tears and feel thoroughly depressed at the death news and to some extent her life also must meet their expectation. However the open window, the comfortable chair, ‘delicious breath of rain’ and the tops of the trees that were ‘all aquiver with the new spring life’, all indicate an underlying feeling of regeneration or rebirth and a mind which is open to the change and the new life that will belong solely to her. The open window through which she stares at the sky represents a glance at life through the eye of freedom. Mrs. Mallard was ‘young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength’; this description has been used as a tool to highlight the change that was taking place within. She was gaining her strength from the expectation of a new life approaching her. These new oncoming years have been portrayed like “creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air”. (Chopin) Again, there are sexual overtones in the story that cannot be overlooked. The initial ‘storm of grief’ is almost indicative of a sexual urge or release, which goes hand in hand with the term ‘wild abandonment’. The quivering of the trees is analogous with the thighs that aquiver with sexual anticipation. As Mrs. Mallard sank into the ‘comfortable roomy armchair’, a feeling of ‘physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul’ (Chopin) pressed her down. Now this kind of exhaustion could be compared to the same exhaustion faced by a person after sexual pleasure or orgasm. The term ‘haunted’ signifies that she was craving for it from within and therefore this freedom meant physical or sexual freedom as well. The upheaval of her bosom after she sat silent for some time in her chair shows the sudden gasp that is also a release of sexual desires after meeting satisfaction. (Chopin). It is not really the weakness of hands but the weakness of her lustful mind, which betrays morality and generates desires to possess the extreme form of sexual joy. Therefore the author seems to suggest that it is not just the social and economic freedom of a woman that is curbed but also the sexual stifling cannot be avoided. The ending reveals that Mr. Mallard is actually alive but Mrs. Mallard dies of grief and shock realizing that her brief period of joy has not lasted while the doctor certifies that she dies of joy and maintains the convention of womanhood. The last death is real but offcourse has a lot to reveal that mere physical death. The story “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner tells us of a particular case of obsession and possessiveness, which leads Emily, the center character of the play to kill Homer, the man she loves, as she fears he might leave her. She wants to make sure that he would be with her always and never disposes the body. The story begins with the funeral of Emily and the town people reveal the story of the girl who is referred to as “poor Emily”. The character is a mystery to the people and this is revealed in the lines “the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years.” (Faulkner) The term “rose” has been used to denote the dangerous passion that Emily nurtures for Homer Barron who initially leaves her only to come back after his work but the girl kills him in order to gain a strange kind of security that is possible only in cases of mental disorderliness. The depth of passion, obsession and unrequited love in the central character Emily, portray her as a ‘outsider’ to the society which has an array of expectations from a woman belonging to the aristocracy. Miss Emily’s mindset is apparently diseased by circumstances. She is previously known in the town as “a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (Faulkner). In some way or the other the townspeople who remained a silent spectator to her life never try to inquire or be friendly with her. Also, she could not be engaged with a man from the town since, it would imply disrupting the distance between her and the society, which is important to her status. Miss Emily perhaps justifies her actions of vengeance on Homer who was by nature similar to her father and has not considered her emotions important. This also explains her death from a heart disease by the end of the story. The people around her rather have immense expectations from a woman of her status and therefore spend time telling stories about her life. Finally the stories reveal a common theme of freedom from the shackles of duties and obligations of the social life, which often becomes suffocating for a woman. Death of the husband who is supposedly the nearest person in a woman’s life brings a certain solace owing to the anticipation of renunciation from all fetters of life. Emily Dickinson’s poem ‘Because I could not stop for death’ also signifies a similar renunciation, which perhaps only death can grant a woman because as long as she lives she would face the domination either sexually or psychologically (Dickinson, 726). Mrs. Mallard gains her emancipation only by dying and her brief freedom enjoyed proves to be a mockery. Glaspell also introduces death to show how the woman can gain control over patriarchal domination by finally killing him and other women silently support her and help her escape the legal punishment. Faulkner’s story shows that only with her disease she could bring an end to the problem of her heart, that is her obsession and insecurity, which initiates her to kill her love and preserve the body. However the townspeople never leave her alone. The final road to emancipation is death, which has been realized by the philosophical Dickinson. Chopin, Kate, “The Story of an Hour”, 1894, retrieved on February 29 2008 from: http://www.pbs.org/katechopin/library/storyofanhour.html Dickinson, Emily. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 5th ed. Margart Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy. New York: Norton, 2005. Faulkner, William, ‘A Rose For Emily”, 1970, April 30 2011 from: http://www.ariyam.com/docs/lit/wf_rose.html Glaspell, Susan, ‘Trifles’, 1916, May 18, 2011 from: http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/eng384/trifles.htm Read More