CTIA REGINA RODRIGUES RAMOS

THE QUEST FOR FEMALE AUTONOMY

IN AMERICAN REALISM

PROFESSORA DR. LEILA ASSUMPO HARRIS

Rio de Janeiro

dezembro - 2010

UNIVERSIDADE DO ESTADO RIO DE JANEIRO INSTITUTO DE LETRAS

DEPARTAMENTO DE LETRAS ANGLO-GERMNICAS

CURSO DE ESPECIALIZAO EM LITERATURAS DE LNGUA INGLESA

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The quest for female autonomy in American Realism

Key Words: female, autonomy, identity, home sphere, marriage, social constraints,

American Realism

The quest for female autonomy is present in many works by American authors at the

end of the 19th century. The social constraints overtly deny women the power to express their

feelings, sexuality, and often, their will. The struggle for female autonomy goes beyond the

need of autonomy over bodies and reaches the edge of respect toward the will to decide

about the woman own life.

The nineteenth-century was certainly a time-period when the idealized images of

femininity had come to its highest position and when the consequences of so great repression

started to be reflected in women's life. It was also one of the most interesting and challenging

time of the development of human relations and of the improvement of the materialistic

society, concerned with money and its conveniences. The deterioration of relations caused by

the eager pursuit of fortune, social and economic status, led to a sense of unsteadiness of

principles, which must be remediated by the establishment of a guardian to the "sound"

principles of morality. According to Barbara Welter (1966), man had neglected the moral

values of his forebears and felt some guilt about his attitudes, but he could release his

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conscience by the reflection that "he had left behind a hostage (...) to all the values which he

held so dear and treated so lightly" (WELTER, 1966:151) - the woman-. By the

establishment of the ideals of the "True Womanhood", spread by magazines, books and all

kinds of "propaganda", the "hostage in the home" would be responsible for the nourishment

and the uphold of the pillars of society and moral values.

The cult of the "True Womanhood" entrapped women in the domestic sphere, where

the values and attributes of the "domestic saint" should be cultivated. Circumscribed to the

home sphere, bound to the nursery and household activities, women were expected to be

satisfied to play the role of the guardian of morality, who would be the uncorrupted force in

the middle of a increasingly corrupted world. To adequately perform the female duties, a

woman should maintain the virtues by which she should judge herself and be "judged by her

husband, her neighbors and society" (WELTER, 1966:152). The cardinal attributes to a "true

woman" were focused on piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. "Put them all

together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife - woman" (WELTER, 1966:152).

Only maintaining such virtues, in spite of every difficulty of daily life, a woman would

acquire the promised happiness in life. Therefore, any other attempt to fulfillment outside the

prescribed role, would be doomed to failure and condemnation. The limited and restrictive

sphere of actions created a stereotype of woman that contributed to hamper the construction

of an identity out of the boundaries of the patriarchal cult of femininity. The social constraints

imposed on women frequently inscribed them on a "static and emotionally debilitating image

which does not allow for personal growth" (CUTTER, 1992:387). Home became the

conflicting environment in which women should deny her own emotions, opinions, sexuality,

desires and identity on behalf of the maintenance of the patriarchal society. Individual

autonomy should be rejected and the only female aim should be selflessness. As cited by

Cutter (1992), according to Nancy Cott, the "canon of domesticity" perpetuated the common

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sensical belief that " women were to live for others'" and this "altruism" should be the highest

pursuit of a true woman for "only by giving up all self-interest did women achieve the purity

of motive that enable them to establish moral reference points in the home" (CUTTER,1992:

384).

Piety was considered as the core of a woman's virtue and the source of the needed

strength to a pure, submissive and domestic life. The lack of piety would jeopardize the

woman purity, transforming the guardian "angel at home" into a "fallen angel" unworthy of

praise, blessings and company. To bear such burden would be quite impossible and the

magazines spread the feared consequences to those who dared to defy such ties: confinement,

mental disease or death (mainly suicide).

To avoid temptation, a woman should be protected, preferable under the bounds of

marriage, in which the woman "great treasure" would be bestowed upon a husband "and from

that time on [she] was completely dependent on him, an empty vessel, without legal or

emotional existence of her own" (WELTER, 1966:154-155). Therefore, marriage was

essential to female happiness.

Social institutions, laws, art, literature, religion and science were powerful instruments

used in the coercion of women. They were worth apparatus to guarantee that women be kept

to her proper domestic sphere. Science provided the unquestioned bias to the demarcated

spheres to male and female actions. Women were seen as prisoner of their reproductive

system, since the ovaries and uterus were responsible for the behavior and social

characteristics, and the rebellion against any patterns would be associated with mental

diseases.

Women should not question her fate, so submissiveness played its crucial role. The

true woman would understand her position and be completely satisfied to perform her duties

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at home, ensuring her husband's happiness and comfort and bearing new generations of

citizens - her lot in this world. "The true woman's place was unquestionably by her own

fireside - as daughter, sister, but most of all as wife and mother"(WELTER, 1966:162). Under

the woman's domain, the home sphere would be a cheerful place to fathers, brothers,

husbands and sons, and so the woman would be praised and fulfilled.

George Burnap saw marriage as 'that sphere for which woman was originally

intended, and to which she is so exactly fitted to adorn and bless, as the wife, the

mistress of a home, the solace, the aid, and the counselor of that ONE, for whose

sake alone the world is of any consequence to her'. (WELTER, 1966:170).

Whereas everything around women encouraged and praised the true womanhood,

many circumstances and forces started to be at work at the end of the 19th century which

impelled women inner self to rebel and look into new horizons and changes. They started to

wish, desire and claim for a new and more creative role in society.

The very perfection of True Womanhood, moreover, carried within itself the seeds

of its own destruction. For if woman was so very little less than angels, she should

surely take more active part in running the world, especially since men were

making such a hash of things (WELTER, 1966:174).

The repressed energy somehow started to inspire women to search for their right to

decide over their own lives. They were eager for autonomy not only over their bodies, but

autonomy to decide where they would find happiness. The True Woman gave birth to the

New Woman but that was only the beginning of the battle. The dislocation of values and

blurring of roles led to a confusing and trouble moment, whose most affected being was the

woman herself. Those who dared to fight for that autonomy against tradition and prejudice

sometimes weren't strong enough to sustain the "flight" and were imprisoned in madness or

death.

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. 'Whither would you soar?' (CHOPIN, 1993:88).

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American Realism provided opportunity for writers, by the end of the 19th century, to

capture and report in their works the "real" anguish and suffering of women at that crucial

point of so many changes and challenges. Writers such as Mary Wilkins Freeman, Kate

Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman portrayed the anxieties promoted by the female

restricted life and through their narratives they gave voice to that silenced women in their

symbolic fight against their social "fate". These writers critiqued the dominant ideology and

tried to undermine the cult of domesticity that kept female captive to the home sphere.

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, in "A New England Nun" (1891), Kate Chopin, in

The Awakening (1899) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892)

skillfully conveyed the anguish of the female characters: Louisa Ellis, Edna Pontellier and

the unnamed wife of doctor John, during their pursuit of a "space" of their own, especially in

relation to marriage constraints and the alternatives left by those who didn't fit the patterns.

Marriage been regarded as the most high state of a woman happiness led these

characters through a battle to find an alternative way. The reality expressed by these authors

in the selected stories were far from the romantic ideal of a heroine. Even though some can

considered that these "heroines" were defeated by the end of the stories, a possible

understanding can cheer them for their triumph over the patriarchal insistence to domain and

annihilate their inner and true selves.

In "A New England Nun", by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, Louisa Ellis faced the

"female" dilemma of giving up herself on behalf of a husband. Louisa was engaged for fifteen

years to Joe Dagget, "fourteen out of the fifteen years the two had not once seen each other,

and they had seldom exchanged letters" (FREEMAN, 1891:6). During her wait she learned to

live her life in a peculiar and exquisite way. Her mother and brother died and by herself she

created a female "laced" world only hers, where there was room only for her smooth and

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serene existence. Louise learned how to take pleasure out of the "home sphere". Fifteen

years before, when she accepted Joe's proposal, Louise let her decision be guided according to

her mother's advice and tradition when she "gently acquiescing with and falling into the

natural drift of girlhood, she had seen marriage ahead as a reasonable feature and a probable

desirability of life" (FREEMAN, 1891:7). Inside her sphere, Louisa indulged herself in small

but methodical pleasures. Her routine intrigued her neighbors for she highly estimated herself

and even used china for every day tea. Louise took pleasure from her solitary life with her

canary and Caesar, her chained dog. Her house was her realm and its neatness symbolized

her great acquisition in life. She "had almost the enthusiasm of an artist over the mere order

and cleanliness of her solitary home. She had throbs of genuine triumph at the sight of the

windowpanes which she had polished until they shone like jewels" (FREEMAN, 1891:9).

When Joe finally came to marry her, Louisa's world was abruptly shaken and even the canary

"fluttered wildly" feeling the disturbance caused by Joe's intrusive masculine presence in that

singular female world. Even though Joe sooner discover he was in love to someone else, he

would keep his word and marry Louisa. Hence, the great goal of "True Womanhood" would

finally took place in Louisa's life. But that "great goal" would demand the surrender of

herself to marriage. By moving into Joe's mother house she would give up and leave behind

her pleasurable "maiden ways" of doing things for the mere and mild pleasure of them, for

"there were some peculiar features of her happy solitary life which she would probably be

obliged to relinquish altogether"(FREEMAN, 1891:10). As a "true woman" Louise would be

responsible for Joe's comfort, Joe's house, Joe's life and Joe's happiness. After discovering Joe

was in love with Lilly, Louisa diplomatically released both of them from their "fate" and that

without anyone of them betrayed their own "real" inclinations. "She did it successfully, and

they finally came to an understanding - but it was a difficult thing, for he was as afraid of

betraying himself as she" (FREEMAN, 1891:15). According to the social patterns of her

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time, Louisa would probably be judged as a fool or a traitor for discarding the "great"

achievement of a woman's life - marriage -. But she preserved her most precious treasure -

herself -. Mary Freeman through the story of Louisa's own choice of spinsterhood offered an

alternative to the dominant belief that happiness could only be achieved in marriage and

selflessness.

If Louisa Ellis had sold her birthright she did not know it, the taste of the pottage

was so delicious, and had been her sole satisfaction for so long. Serenity and placid

narrowness had become to her as the birthright itself. (...). Louisa sat, prayerfully

numbering her days, like an uncloistered nun (FREEMAN, 1891:17).

Kate Chopin, in The Awakening, depicted the struggle of Edna Pontellier to deal with

the awakening of her repressed self and the constraints imposed on women by patriarchal

society. According to the standards of patriarchal marriages, women should relinquish

personal interests on behalf of the family - specially husband and children - and be thankful

for the holy pleasure of effacing personal aspirations to become the angel of the house, the

guardian of the moral principles of society. The 19th

century ideal woman was symbolized in

Chopin's novel by Madame Adele Ratignolle, the beautiful and submissive wife, child bearing

and intellectually "pathetic", adored by the husband and praised by society. Although Adele

was highly esteemed by Edna, the "domestic harmony" in Ratignolle family - husband as

proprietor and wife as property - anguished Edna. "She was moved by a kind of

commiseration for Madame Ratignolle - a pity for that colorless existence which never

uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment" (CHOPIN,1993: 56). In

contrast with Adele's submissive attitude, Edna was not able to accomplish the ideal standard

of a "true woman". Definitely she was not the mother-woman kind of person. Placed by

marriage among the Creole's affectionate society, Edna was impressed by their way of

expressing feelings and their behavior triggered the emancipation of her hidden self -

emotional and sensual one.

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A characteristic which distinguished them and which impressed Mrs. Pontellier most

forcibly was their entire absence of prudery. Their freedom of expression was at first

incomprehensible to her, though she had no difficulty in reconciling it with a lofty

chastity which in the Creole woman seems to be inborn and unmistakable.

In Grand Isle, where "[The Creole] were women who idolized their children,

worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals

and grow wings as ministering angels" (CHOPIN, 1993:8), there Edna's inner self began its

awakening and led Edna to be emotionally involved with Robert Lebrun. Her propensity for

infatuation had been repressed since early manifestations and to assure it imprisonment she

married Lonce Pontellier hoping that "as the devoted wife of a man who worshiped her, (...)

she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals

forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams" (CHOPIN, 1993:18). Edna

managed to conceal her inner self, its desires and fantasies - her dual life "that outward

existence which conforms, the inward life which question" (CHOPIN, 1993: 13) -, among

Monsieur Pontellier's possession as one his "valuable piece of property". But at Grand Isle she

felt as her "will had blazed up, stubborn and resistant" (CHOPIN, 1993:31) and she began "to

realize her position in the universe as a human being" (CHOPIN, 1993:13). Edna's inner self

was eager for freedom, for the liberty to assume its place in the world, and moved by that

eagerness Edna decided not to submit to anyone's command anymore. She started to break the

chains that kept herself bound to social constraints. Edna's repressed sensual affections

emerged in Grand Isle, and she began to comprehend the value of her true self, which was

essential for her, something she would never give up, even on behalf of her children. She tried

to explain her position to Madame Ratignolle, but her thoughts were quite unattainable to

Adele: I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my

children; but I wouldnt give myself" (CHOPIN, 1993:47).

After her awakening, Edna "began to do as she liked and to feel as she liked"

(CHOPIN, 1993:56). Her behavior caused estrangement among her acquaintances and the

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worry of her husband, who definitely didn't recognized the new woman with whom he wasn't

able to interact in terms other than proprietor and property. "He could not see that she was

becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment

with which to appear before the world" (CHOPIN, 1993:57). According to Jo Ellen Jacobs

(KOLOSKI, 1988: 111) Edna's acts of rebellion against the social constraints "would have

been more fruitful if she had been able to understand herself", which she was not "trained to"

or nor allowed to by the limiting codes of western patriarchal society of her time. Edna's

immaturity to balance her inner desires with the courage to flight beyond the prejudices led

her to her final act of rebellion - her suicide. She learned the true value of herself but society

didn't offer her much choice. The freedom of her inner self didn't fit the patterns of the limited

role established for women in 19th

century patriarchal society. When she finally understood

her situation, that she wouldn't surrender to marriage constraints, to Lonce or any man who

intended to possess her, and that such decision would be the disgrace of her children, she

took the only attitude available to preserve her newly acquired autonomy and her dignity.

"She cannot live and preserve her self-identity, but she can die without giving it up"

(JACOBS, In: KOLOSKI, 1988:112). Her suicide represented the only alternative left to keep

the female alternative over life, for a woman whose newly discovered identity didn't cope

with the "real patriarchal world" requirements.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in "The Yellow Wallpaper", also used her pen to portray

the mental breakdown as the ultimate alternative of a domineered woman under the

constraints of the patriarchal marriage. Women's condition in the story could be symbolically

compared to the bared women "visualized" under the patterns of the yellow wallpaper "and it

is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern" (GILMAN, 1899:5)

all of them trying hard to get free from that humiliating status.

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The story of the unnamed wife of doctor John depicted the conflicting condition of

women submitted to the unfair male and female roles. The story masterly exposed the

domineering power of a man over a woman, her body, her will, her desires and even her

imagination, and the terrifying consequences of living confined to home sphere - a bared

nursery - forbidden to experience any "congenial work, with excitement and change"

(GILMAN, 1899: 1). "With its images of barred windows and sinister bedsteads, creeping

women and domineering men, the story does indeed raise the issue of sex roles in an effective

way"(SCHUMAKER,1985:589).

Gilman skillfully presented her character's struggle against the social accepted

relationship inside patriarchal marriage of the 19th century - women placed at a inferior

position, as an incapacitated being, who needed the tutorial authority of a husband to properly

eradicate all rebellious female instinct that could lead to any kind of emancipation - especially

if this emancipatory impulse deals with imagination or intellectual activities. The narrator of

"The Yellow Wallpaper" story describes the social belief of the dangerous female use of

imagination for a "feeble woman" like her when reporting her husband's orders toward her

desire of writing: "He [John] says that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making,

a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought

to use my will and good sense to check the tendency"(GILMAN, 1899:3). The unnamed wife

was deprived of stimulus and "worthy" companion, bared to a house where there were a

"heavy bedstead", "bared windows" "a gate at the head of the stairs" and a horrid yellow

wallpaper. She blamed herself for not fit the expectation of a "true woman", who instead of

taking care of her family was a burden: "I meant to be such a help to John, such a real rest and

comfort, and here I am a comparative burden already"(GILMAN, 1899: 2). Her incapacity to

fulfill the requirements of a "true woman" led her to be diagnosed with "temporally nervous

depression - a slight hysterical tendency" (GILMAN, 1899: 1) and the prescribed remedy to

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her condition would be "the rest cure" - reclusion of body and mind. She "personally"

disagreed with the treatment, "but what is one to do?" (GILMAN, 1899:1). The narrator's

fight symbolized the total lack to autonomy affecting all women at her time: she was

entrapped by social patterns - a wife must submit to the husband "prescriptions" and will; she

was forbidden to choose or decide whatever would be better to herself, even the possibility to

choose the room in where to be confined was denied; she should even submit her imagination,

once she was completely forbidden, by the husband, the doctors and the sister-in-law, to

engage in writing - "I verily believe she thinks it is writing which made me sick". Emotionally

and intellectually violated, the unnamed wife of doctor John fought to find an identity and

some self autonomy by symbolically unrevealing and destroying the pointless patterns that

kept women barred inside them. The degeneration of her state of mind increased to a critical

point in which madness was her only freedom from her state of "beloved" child, cripple

being, a female prisoner of the unhealthy "yellowish" social pattern. She identified with the

woman behind the barred pattern and in her desperate act she destroyed both of them by

tearing off the wallpaper and finally she "revealed to John the wife he is attempting to create

- the woman without illusions or imagination who spends all her time creeping"

(SHUMAKER, 1985:592).

Spinsterhood, suicide and madness are recurrent themes in the works of the chosen

writers and in many others of the end of the 19th century. They tried to awake the conscience

of their readers and of society with these female characters attitudes, which consisted of some

sort of desperate and dramatic indictments of the unbearable condition to what women were

submitted. Many stories were rejected and left unpublished, and many readers and critics

probably considered the ends of the stories as the depiction of women defeat. Although many

died and got mad, certainly these works helped many women to be freed from the social

oppression. Gilman answer to her readers in The Forerunner (1913) magazine can be

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considered as a probable answer of Freeman and Chopin about their work: "The Yellow

Wallpaper", "A New England Nun" and The Awakening "[were] not intended to drive people

crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked" (GILMAN, 1913).

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

CHOPIN, Kate. The Awakening. New York: Dover Thrift, 1993.

CUTTER, Martha J. "Beyond Stereotypes: Mary Wilkins Freeman's Radical Critique of

Nineteenth-Century Cults of Femininity". In: Women's Studies,Vol. 21, 1992, pp.383-395.

UK: Gordon and Breach, Science Publishers S.A. Available at < www. csun. edu/ ~sa 54649 /

355/ BeyondStereotypes.pdf> Accessed on December 20th

, 2010.

FREEMAN, Mary E. Wilkins. "A New England Nun". In: A New England Nun and Other

Sories. New York: Harper & Broters Publishers, 1891. Available at . Accessed on December 22th

, 2010.

GILMAN, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper". Boston: Small & Maynard, 1899.

Available at

Accessed on December 28th

, 2010.

________________________. "Why I Wrote The Yellow Wallpaper". In The Forerunner.

October, 1913. Available at < http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender

/whyyw.html > Accessed on December 29th

, 2010.

JACOBS, Jo Ellen. "The Awakening in a Corse on Philosophical Ideas in Literature". In:

KOLOSKI, Bernard (ed). Approaches to Teaching Chopin's. New York, The Modern

Language Associaton of America, 1988.

SHUMAKER, Conrad. '"Too Terribly Good to Be Printed': Charlotte Gilman's 'The Yellow

Wallpaper'". In.: American Literature, Vol. 57, N 4 (Dec., 1985), pp.588-599. Durham, Duke

University Press. Available at . Accessed on

November 22th

, 2010.

WELTER, Barbara. "The Cult of True Womanhood:1820-1860. In: American Quarterly,

Vol.18, No. 2, Part 1 (Summer, 1966), 151-174. Available at