Love In Stormy Relationships Essay, Research Paper
James Roche
Senior Thesis
1 June 1999
Love in Stormy Relationships
The inability to attain love in one’s lifetime as proven in the
novels of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton, due to the truth that
marriages no longer base themselves upon love as the primary
prerogative; rather, put priority upon the superficial desires
of avarice and hubris, created by the social constraints of
their society.
Both Kate Chopin’s The Awakening Edith Wharton’s The House of
Mirth display how love eludes man during his life using the main
character as parallels to one person. Characters whom are
placed into a predicament to which the only solution becomes
death, allowing them to escape the binds of society and become
free to love without restraint. The characters Edna Pontellier
and Lily Bart found love outside the bounds of which society
would extend for them, one outside her marriage and the other
outside her class. These situations make it impossible for love
to succeed and thus, the main characters are left without
attaining love because love can’t conquer all.
“In novels written by men the hero finally chooses an apostasy
which promises both personal and artistic fulfillment…. Almost
always in novels written by women, however, the same struggle
ends up in madness or suicide. This significant difference
between male and female images in literature reflects and
reinforces the cultural roles which men and women assume….
Kate Chopin’s The Awakening…is still the clearest statement of
the feminine dilemma that we have.” (C. Bogarad, TCLC, vol. 5)
These roles explain the ending to The Awakening, the prison
created by gender-typing offers the female very little
opportunity to reach their love and so without it they are then
left with little else to cling to upon the earth. Upon breaking
this tradition Edna was offered little more than this piece of
advice: “The bird that would soar above the level plain of
tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad
spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering
back to earth.” (Chopin, The Awakening, p.110) And this became
of that advice, “The water of the Gulf stretched out before
her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of
the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring,
murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude.
All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living
thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air
above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the
water.” This quote foreshadows the outcome of Edna’s attempt to
break from tradition, it suggests her death. Using such
inviting imagery to describe the sea and the reoccurring
reference to the bird allow us to formulate an idea as to what
happened to Edna, to hint at the inevitability of her suicide.
Imprisonment, a theme threaded throughout House of Mirth. The
imprisonment of women by their roles in society and marriage.
This institute of marriage becomes a prison for Wharton’s
characters; one from which the only escape comes in death or
divorce; an escape into or out of a male-dominated world. Lily
Bart(heroine of House of Mirth), never marries and finds her
prison in society, its inacceptance of an individual female, an
unmarried female. This lifestyle creates confrontation between
social convention\appropriateness versus the individual;
conforming to society and being accepted\admired or breaking
free at the risk of scrutiny, scorn, and the disapproval of the
rest of society. Lily, imprisoned in a society where the
allowance of individual freedom depended on the threat of the
integrity to the structure of society:
“How alluring the world outside the gilded cage appeared to
Lily, as she heard its door clang on her. In reality, as she
knew, the door never clanged: it stood always open; but most of
the captives were like flies in a bottle, and having once flown
in, could never regain their freedom. It was Seldon’s
distinction that he had never forgotten the way out.” (Wharton,
House of Mirth) Lily’s prison was self-inflicted; while society
may lead to this feeling, much like depression may lead to
suicide; imprisonment stems from the individual, from a reaction
to the society or institution they are in. If one had the
strength and moral fiber they could find the way out; however,
for many prison, “… secures [one] in the world, which [they]
profess to have renounced, but in fact cherished to the end of
[their] life.”(E.W. Extro. Life, Dwight)
On the issue of love and societal restrictions from that
Wharton has been quoted as saying
“…Past the alien faces of antique civilizations and the
familiar wonders of Greece, till I swam upon the fiercely
rushing tide of the Middle Ages, with its swirling eddies of
passion, its heaven-reflecting pools of poetry and art…The
rhythmic blow of the craftsmen’s hammers in the goldsmiths’
workshops and on the walls of the churches, the party cries of
armed factions in the narrow streets, the organ roll of Dante’s
verse, the crackle of fagots around the Arnold of Brescia, the
twitter of the swallows to which St. Francis preached, the
laughter of the ladies listening on the hillside to the quips of
the Deamerin, while the plague-struck Florence howled beneath
them–all this and much more I heard, joined in such strange
unison with the voices earlier and more remote, fierce,
passionate, or tender, yet subdued to such awful harmony that I
thought of the song that the morning stars sang together and
felt of though it were sounding in my ears.
My heart beat to suffocation; the tears burned my lids; the
joy, the mystery of it seemed too intolerable to be borne. I
could not understand even the words of the song; but I knew that
if there had been someone at my side who could have heard it
with me, we might have found the key together. (E.W.ExtroLife,
Dwight)
Wharton, just as Lily, subject to feelings of imprisonment from
their institutions and societal restraints; whom on finding the
one who would have been able to unlock the words to Dante with
them, and also the door to their prison could have escaped the
feelings of despair which overtook them and thus, would then
find themselves capable to hold onto love; however, Lily
overdosed on chloral and only in death, “…in the silence there
passed between them the word which made all clear.” (Wharton,
House of Mirth, p.317)
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