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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