Women at the Turn of the Century Literature - Book Report/Review Example

Turn of the Century Literature Women at the turn of the century were in the process of throwing off their old constrained roles as wives and mothers belonging only to the men in their lives to becoming full human beings, insisting on their rights and asserting their abilities in and out of the home. One of the ways they were doing this was by writing books and articles that advocated women gaining more respect and revealed how unhealthy it was to treat women as something equal to objects. For example, in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, it is mentioned that "Shreiner analyzed in close detail the effects of narcissism and idleness on women robbed of all functions except the aesthetic" (1: 1176).

This emptying effect can be found in the short story "The Other Two" by Edith Wharton. In this short story, Alice Waythorn is described by her newest husband beginning on their first night back from their honeymoon. This is at a time when women were able to receive a divorce and Mrs. Waythorn had already been divorced twice before, with a child from the first marriage. As Mr. Waythorn thinks about her previous husbands, and is forced to come into contact with them again and again, he realizes that her various marriages have been Alice's means of stepping up in society.

Her first marriage was to a downtrodden, barely successful man from another town when she was only 17. "Alice Haskett's remarriage with Gus Varick was a passport to the set whose recognition she coveted" (2: 44). However, he was still not the polished gentleman she wanted and she again divorced with sufficient grievances to receive the blessings of the New York court. Rather than being angry, he eventually comes to accept this as the only avenue open to her. This acceptance comes only after Mr.

Waythorn starts to see his wife as something more than an object existing only to comfort him: "he had been drawn to her by the unperturbed gayety which kept her fresh and elastic at an age when most women's activities are growing either slack or febrile" (2: 43). Even though her child is deathly ill, he decides they should leave on a honeymoon and expects her, even after they are called back, to be his fresh and lovely wife. This is made clear as she comes back downstairs and tells him about the injunction that her first husband should be allowed to visit his daughter: "in a moment or two their eyes met above the sparkling glasses.

Her own were quite clear and untroubled: he saw that she had obeyed his injunction and forgotten" (2: 45). Yet the truth was that she was not fresh and untroubled as the rest of the story reveals. Mr. Waythorn is clearly troubled by the intrusion of ex-husbands into his life and consistently lets his wife realize his discomfort. She, in turn, consistently attempts to subdue any contact with them which might upset her new husband, including lying to him about contacts made in order to keep him happy.

"It was as if her whole aspect, every gesture, every inflection, every allusion, were a studied negation of that period of her life. If she had denied being married to Haskett she could hardly have stood more convicted of duplicity than in this obliteration of the self which had been his wife" (2: 51). However, he is finally forced to admit that she could not be anything other than what she was - a product of her past and her circumstances. "He began to reckon up the advantages which accrued from it, to ask himself if it were not better to own a third of a wife who knew how to make a man happy than a whole one who had lacked opportunity to acquire the art.

For it was an art, and made up, like all others, of concessions, eliminations and embellishments; of lights judiciously thrown and shadows skillfully softened" (2: 55). Throughout the story, it is shown that Mrs. Waythorn was forced to focus on her identity as an aesthetic object, intended only to smooth over difficult social situations and make everything pleasant, because of the society in which she lived. Her personality and her own concerns were subsumed so far under this injunction that she perhaps couldn't even recognize it herself anymore and was beginning to pass it on to her daughter.