Introduction
Women were slaves in the early twentieth century, slaves to social conventions and a male-dominated business world. Very few women were able to escape the specific roles assigned to them by their gender and social status. Edith Wharton’s book, House of Mirth, originally published in Scribner magazine in 1905, was the first novel written by a woman writer to be taken seriously by the nation’s male literary establishment. This is because she portrayed women acting out their proper role in society, she showed her main character to be somewhat shallow, and she allowed her main character to fail.
However, within this portrayal, she also exposed some of the major issues that had already been explored by other female writers before her and that would continue to be explored in increasing focus after her. Other female writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, wrote more specifically about the female problem from the other side of the equation – what happens when a woman finds herself unable to conform to the norms set by her society – perhaps thanks to the shorter format of the stories they were able to get published. By examining how each author wrote about the theme of female subjugation behind a male-dominated conception, both Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman demonstrated how the non-conforming female character has no choice but to fail.
Female subjugation in “House of Mirth”
Edith Wharton emphasizes the dilemma of the constrained female through her portrayal of Lily Bart, a woman without form or success because she exists without the influence of a man. Lily’s interests and pursuits are dictated by the man she is attempting to attract at the given time. She “easily charms Gryce with her considerable feminine wiles” (Worth 46) after she had learned all she can about Americana literature, Gryce’s only hobby. In dealing with Mr. Trenor and Mr. Bart, she gives each of them undivided, customized attention according to their desires rather than her own. Finally, Lily reaches the end of her proverbial rope and makes a last effort to save herself by offering to marry Mr. Rosedale, someone she refused to consider earlier in the story. As he proposes a way for her to redeem her former status, “she found the indignation [to the plan] gradually freezing on her lip…” (Wharton 252) as she starts to contemplate taking other actions she had thus far scrupulously avoided.
Without the assistance of a man, Lily is also totally incapable of managing her finances. When Mrs. Trenor mentions “it was the idea of the gambling debt that frightened Percy” (Wharton 76), the reader realizes that Lily’s chances for Mr. Gryce are destroyed by her excessive spending, gambling, and inability to control herself as it shows through her debt. Her only other attempt to get into business is a disastrous partnership with Gus Trenor in which “Lily naively believes that Gus will invest a portion of her meager income in the stock market and make ‘a killing’” (Worth 47). The reader knows that Lily’s final attempt to support herself through work at a millenary shop cannot work because of the conversation she had with Seldon at the opening of the story:
“Isn’t marriage your vocation? Isn’t it what you’re all brought up for?”
She sighed. “I suppose so. What else is there?” (Wharton 11).
Lily cannot be a success because she doesn’t have a man to support her, to guide her, or to train her in another area.
By the end of the book, Lily has run out of marriage prospects, and therefore, fails at life. Lily reflects on the differences between what she might do in society as opposed to the many more things Carry Fisher can do. “It all turned on the tiresome distinction between what a married woman might, and a girl might not do” (Wharton 79) is the conclusion at which Lily arrives. If Lily had been married even once, she would have held much greater freedoms in her actions. In addition, Lily could not perform any of the social obligations she had dreamed of doing without the security of a marriage. Although Gerty Farish is capable of performing social work as a full-time activity, Lily does not even consider it as something to do until after she has secured her wealth (Wharton 111). In the end, Lily dies because she is unsuccessful at business as the result of her upbringing and unsuccessfully married. Carry Fisher seems to sum up Lily’s character the best when she tells Seldon:
“That’s Lily all over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the
ground and sowing her seed, but the day she ought to be reaping the
harvest she oversleeps herself or goes off on a picnic…. Sometimes I
think it’s just flightiness — and sometimes I think it’s because, at heart,
she despises the things she’s trying for” (Wharton 185).
Through this story, Wharton indicates that Lily failed at life because she did not have the strength of a husband to hold her up and because there are no other viable options available to her.
Female subjugation in “The Yellow Wallpaper”
In Gilman’s short story, first published in 1899 by Small & Maynard of Boston, MA, a woman slowly loses her sanity as a result of her inability to conform to societal norms. In the story, an unnamed woman and her family take up residence in a remote mansion as a means of giving her the rest her husband has prescribed for a small case of postpartum depression she is experiencing. At every stage of her illness, it can be seen that the husband has little understanding of how she feels and little regard for her input regarding what might help her. Although she realizes there is something wrong with her, she writes that the men of her world, her husband and her brother who are both physicians, do not agree that she is sick, describing her condition as being a “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency” (Gilman, 1899). While the diagnosis is to rest, with absolutely no burdens placed upon her, this treatment does not seem the wise course to the woman. “I disagree with their ideas. I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?” (Gilman, 1899). Regardless of what she knows of herself instinctively, her opinion has no bearing on what will happen to her.
The woman takes up residence in an upper room of the remote house, thought to have originally been a nursery, with bars on the windows and old faded yellow wallpaper attached to the walls. This wallpaper plays a large role in the progression of the woman’s illness as she begins to see women creeping around inside it, trying to escape the oppression they, too, have experienced. “Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind. And she is all the time trying to climb through.
But nobody could climb through that pattern – it strangles so; I think that is why it has so many heads” (Gilman, 1899). Through the course of the story, the woman transforms from an individual who adores the outside and green growing things to the artificial creation of man. Because she, too, cannot escape from the confining room in which she has been housed, the woman becomes completely insane, creeping around the walls herself after peeling the wallpaper off as high as she can reach, even creeping over her husband, who has fainted against the wall, to continue her progress unimpeded. The story, an exaggerated account of an event from Gilman’s own life, stands as a statement against the male oppression of women experienced throughout much of history, but particularly as it was still experienced in the late 19th century when this story was written.
Comparison of novels
In Wharton’s novel, Lily’s failure to find a husband as well as her failure to succeed in business resulted in her failure in life. She had plenty of examples of how to behave successfully in the other characters of Wharton’s book including Judy Trenor, Gerty Farish, and Netty Struther, all three successful in very different ways while still working within their socially constrained roles. Her story enabled Edith Wharton to finally gain acceptance by the male literary world because she provided for women a bleak example of what could happen to them if they chose to step outside of their social bonds.
Lily’s failure was not a threat to the male-dominated society. It seemed instead to reinforce its ideals in proper female behavior and was given high literary acclaim. The fact that the story was written by a woman gave it even more credibility in the instruction of other women on proper feminine behavior. However, a careful reading of the text exposes how the constraints placed upon women ultimately lead to disaster. Gilman exposes these ideas more openly in her short story as she traces how her main character falls completely under the control of her husband, including whether or not she can read or write and how this outward control only serves to drive her insane. Taken together, these two stories illustrate how women were completely trapped in whatever form of lifestyle they might find themselves in. If married, they were constrained within the bounds of what their husbands would allow them to do. If they were not married, their choices were only more limited.
By choosing these issues to include in their stories, both women fit securely within the feminine literature movement as they struggle to expose issues that must be corrected if society is to be healthy.
References
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. (1899). The Yellow Wallpaper. Boston: Small & Maynard.
Wharton, Edith. (1994). The House of Mirth. Ed. Martha Banta. Oxford: Oxford U.P.