Marriage, The (Social) Prison
A feminist analysis of women protagonists in three works of literature
Patriarchy is a violent gender hierarchy that has historically benefited men, more so white, cisgender, straight, and middle and upper-class, over the oppression and exploitation of marginalized genders, women being the largest group. This global system is reproduced through various societal and cultural institutions. Gender itself and the control over gender roles, norms, and expressions are at the core of male dominance. The latter is sustained mainly thanks to one of the most widespread, powerful, and abusive patriarchal institutions — marriage.
Rooting itself in the marriage market of for husbands and the later loss of property rights until the 20th century, marriage, as writes , is in “world-historic transformation” now; while it is being actively detraditionalized (note that queer marriage is problematic in itself), the reforms to marriage cannot change its origins as an institution deeming women as property. Thus, I believe one of the most effective ways to unravel the dominant gender hierarchy is by studying marriage in literature, which often reflects the social realities of the time.
Through an analysis of three 19th and 20th-century American Literature pieces, I argue that marriage is a (social) prison imposed on women by patriarchy.
Hawthorne, Gilman, and Stein
Written in 1843, 1892, and 1909 — Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and Gertrude Stein’s “The Gentle Lena” respectively — the three short stories analyzed here are remarkable examples of dark romanticism in the first case and modernism in the latter two. The protagonists in all the stories are women who are made to get married or have already been married.
Gender analysis is vital to this literature. I could almost read the three pieces as naturalist literature; the greater force of patriarchal marriage outweighs the will and freedom of choice of the protagonists. On the other hand, the pathos in all the stories is overwhelming. Empathetic to the protagonists — Georgiana in “The Birth-Mark,” the anonymous narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and Lena in “The Gentle Lena” —the emotion and taken-away power work hand-in-hand to establish the power of the institution of marriage.
If emotion were taken away, then the contrast between genders would be reduced, which would partially end the gender-based dominance in marriage. If wives’ power was equal to their husbands’, marriage could not sustain itself. So, the power was stolen from the married women. Thus, despite naturalist elements of patriarchal marriage, the stories are, in fact, dark romantic, and modernist, respectively.
Alleged male rationality acts as an oppressor
Marriage as an institution of oppression and the (social) imprisonment of women is first and foremost embodied by the “superiority” of alleged male rationality. While the father of Lena’s husband in “The Gentle Lena” could imply the subordinance of childbearing and household chores compared to the husband’s job with his lines of “stand up for an hour Herman, and then you don’t never to have any more bother to it,” neither secondary characters nor Lena’s husband explicitly point out to the husband’s alleged rationality over Lena’s passive emotionality, excluding rationality as a key component for preserving Lena’s prison of marriage.
Meanwhile, Georgiana in “The Birth-Mark” and the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” are abused by their husbands’ alleged and enforced rationality. In the first lines of “The Birth-Mark,” the author firmly establishes the dynamics between the love toward Georgiana and science (rationality): “It was not unusual for the love of science to rival the love of woman.” According to , PhD. in Postcolonial, Comparative, and American Studies, the piece also reflects “biological and mental differences between men and women, propagated in 19th-century American society,” like the superior alleged rationality of masculine over the subordinate emotionality of the feminine.
As , if “read broadly, Aylmer [Georgiana’s husband] in the story is an allegory for science, and Georgiana is an allegory for nature,” granting women an inferior position of being subjected to the man’s power. Such is the case in this story: the possibility of being changed to be improved and perfected by the science and the rationale.
Similarly, the narrator’s husband in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a medical doctor who “is practical in the extreme” and “scoffs openly at any talk of things not to be felt and seen and put down in figures.” Although John, the narrator’s husband, is a man of science (medicine), he forbids her from working until she is well again. “There comes John, and I must put this away, — he hates to have me write a word,” says the narrator.
“John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.”
Despite the narrator’s feelings, it is he who, through an “objective” diagnosis and rational thinking, decides how she must be treated. “The oppressive structure at issue is a man’s prescriptive discourse about a woman,” writes in her “Monumental Feminism and Literature’s Ancestral House: Another Look at “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
John constantly reminds the narrator, that “as a doctor, he is the one who really knows,” according to Haney-Peritz. Overall, the “superiority” of alleged rationality over emotionality is crucial to maintaining male dominance and co-establishing the (social) prison of marriage.
Gaslighting further upholds the prison
Gaslight is the second pillar of the patriarchal marriage as a (social) prison in the three stories. Gaslighting is the manipulation of a person to question their reality and sanity. This is a universal theme in the analyzed literature.
Starting with “The Birth-mark,” throughout the text, Aylmer, the husband, is gaslighting his wife Georgiana into believing that her birthmark is an imperfection that needs to be fixed: “Aylmer opened his eyes upon his wife’s face, and recognized the symbol of imperfection; and when they sat together at the evening hearth, his eyes wandered stealthily to her cheek, and beheld.” The gaslight to the point of successfully manipulating his wife to undergo the birthmark removal procedure is followed by Georgiana’s enforced admitting of the wrongness of the birthmark, “Save your poor wife from madness?” says she, and later in the story refers to the birthmark as stigma, “There is but one danger — that this horrible stigma shall be left upon my cheek!” […] Remove it! remove it!”
Qabaha writes, “Science can be disguised for sexual idealization, and obsession with perfection can be disguised for women’s peace, and driving women into madness can be disguised for imperfection.” According to Qabaha, this literary piece signifies the consequences of the misuse of science and power and the commodification of women; it is the gaslighting that effectively manipulates the wife to give up on her unique feature for the sake of her marriage.
This literary piece signifies the consequences of the misuse of science and power and the commodification of women
Gaslighting leads to the wife’s agreement to undergo the medical procedure, which represents, as Gaard & Gruen describe (and Qabaha quotes), the “reduction of all things into mere resources to be optimized, dead, inert matter to be used.” Women’s fight for freedom corresponds to the struggle against the concepts of passive, disembodied, and objectified nature when deemed equal to the latter, according to Noel Sturgeon, Ph.D., whom Qubaha also quotes.
The narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” too, is made to doubt her feelings. The fifth line on the first page illustrates this: “John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage.” The laughter at one and not with institutes power dynamics in the marriage. “You see, he does not believe I am sick!” writes the narrator on the story’s first page.
Not only does John (the husband) dismiss her feelings, but he also actively requires her to submit to his perception of reality based on the previously examined alleged rational judgment. “John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him,” says the narrator, clearly presenting her husband’s repudiation to consider her feelings about her health.
Simultaneously, the narrator comes the closest to realizing the gaslight in the story in the following line: “And I know John would think it absurd. But I must say what I feel and think in some way — it is such a relief!”
Haney‐Peritz brings a similar example of the narrator claiming that writing would do her good but also saying that it tires her out, stating it as an example of the “binary oppositions” in the piece. I believe the latter example shows the effects of gaslighting, as well; the narrator questions her reality; she is unsure if the writing is good for her as she believes or if it is tiring according to her husband’s rationale.
Lastly, “The Gentle Lena” includes many descriptions of scolding toward Lena with explicit gaslight components. She was passivized primarily because of gaslight and patriarchal abuse (including from women’s reproduction of patriarchy): “Lena was good and never wanted her own way, she was learning English, and saving all her wages, and soon Mrs. Haydon would get her a good husband.”
“Answer me, Lena, don’t you like Herman Kreder? He is a fine young fellow, almost too good for you, Lena, when you stand there so stupid and don’t make no answer. There ain’t many poor girls that get the chance you got now to get married”
was followed by Lena saying:
“I do whatever you tell me it’s right for me to do. I marry Herman Kreder, if you want me.”
Because of the pressure and gaslight, Lena was forced to doubt her feelings about her potential husband and marriage and conform to Mrs. Haydon’s will. After her potential husband does not show up at the wedding, Lena is blamed and made to believe it was her fault by Mrs. Haydon:
“No, it ain’t no use your standin’ there and cryin’, now, Lena. It’s too late now to care about that Herman. You should have cared some before, and then you wouldn’t have to stand and cry now, and be a disappointment to me”
While these examples are not directly made in the context of marriage relationships, they are meant to force someone into a marriage. Gaslight, analyzed in the three literary pieces, successfully manipulates women into marrying and staying married, thus (socially) imprisoning them.
Death is the only escape
The woman’s death is the ultimate outcome of the (social) imprisonment of marriage. Death is not necessarily biological; similar to the prison, it may be social and/or mental.
In “The Birth-Mark,” Georgiana is killed by her husband’s experiment in making her perfect for him. “With so high and pure a feeling, you have rejected the best that earth could offer. Aylmer — dearest Aylmer — I am dying!” Georgiana is killed the second she is made perfect for her husband. It demonstrates the impossibility of not only being perfect but particularly for women to uphold all the gender norms and expectations (in this case, Aylmer, her husband, acts as the patriarchal gaze). When women are forced to conform to all the expectations and norms — they die, or rather, are killed by the patriarchal system.
Qabaha writes Hawthorne might imply that women need to question the patriarchal authority over them; otherwise, they will not survive the gender expectations. Qabaha goes on with an ecofeminist reading of the story: “Nature and women [are seen] as subordinate entities necessary for the progress of male-dominated society.”
“The Birth-Mark” may also be analyzed through the lens of the colonizer and colonized relationship. As Spencer-Wood points out, the woman is viewed as a commodity and obtained resource via “dispossession, marginalization, subjugation, and exploitation,” Qabaha quotes.
Stein’s “The Gentle Lena,” too, ends with death. Lena dies of reproduction, a female agency historically exploited by patriarchy. “While [the baby] was coming, Lena had grown very pale and sicker. When it was all over Lena had died, too, and nobody knew just how it had happened to her.”
“Herman Kreder now always lived very happy, very gentle, very quiet, very well content alone with his three children.” Lena died to give birth to the child, while her husband would not even wonder what had happened to her. Essentially, in his eyes, she was only a biological incubator. As , “In the process of fading gradually to nothing, Lena produces a trinity of children and dies bearing the fourth.” She is, in a sense, slowly fading away throughout the story until the patriarchal marriage kills her.
In contrast to these two stories, Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” does not end with the protagonist’s death or murder. Instead, Haney‐Peritz notes, as the shadow-woman in the wallpaper becomes as “plain as can be,” the narrator starts to distinguish clearly day from night, sleep from waking, and most importantly, “me” from them. She is liberated with and thanks to the woman imprisoned in the wallpaper:
“I’ve got out at last,” said I, “in spite of you and Jane? And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”
The wallpaper being the “the oppressive structures of the society in which [the narrator] finds herself,” according to Gilbert & Gubar, the liberation of the woman from it shows her defeat of the patriarchal oppression. While the contrast between the deaths in the first two stories and the liberation, thus life, in the third story, is evident, the violent consequences of marriage can still be traced in Gilman’s narrator at the end of the story:
“[He fainted], and right across my path by the wall, so I had to creep over him every time!”
It was the climax of the slow-burn revolt. However my stance on the rebellious liberation may be, I cannot deny the possible negative health impacts of the marriage on the rest of the narrator’s life. Marriage either kills the woman (biologically, socially, and/or mentally) or substantially harms them at the end of the (social) prison life sentence.
Towards a more gender-just future
In conclusion, literature analysis can spotlight a given time period’s social realities. In this essay, I explored the theme of marriage in three 19th and 20th-century American literature pieces: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and Gertrude Stein’s “The Gentle Lena.” I argued that marriage is a social prison for women by analyzing the protagonists of the three short stories. First, I presented the “superiority” of the alleged male rationality as a key embodiment of marriage. Then, I explored gaslight as an effective imprisonment for women to marry and stay married. Lastly, I regarded the (biological, social, and/or mental) death and killing or substantial harm of wives in the three stories as the eventual outcome of (social) life imprisonment.
By recognizing the harmful effects of marriage and its inherent (social) imprisoning essence, with this text, I hope to raise awareness of the necessity for radical change for a more gender-just and feminist future liberated from the patriarchal institution of marriage.
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