Domestic Prison
Gender Roles and Marriage
The Domestic Prison: James Thurber's "Secret Life of Walter Mitty" and Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour"
James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" (1939) and "The Story of an Hour" (1894) by Kate Chopin depict marriage as a prison for both men and women from which the main characters fantasize about escaping. Louise Mallard is similar to the unnamed narrator in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is that they are literally imprisoned in a domestic world from which there is no escape but death or insanity. As in all of this early feminist fiction, the women characters are defined as 'sick', either physically or mentally, for even imaging a situation on which they might be free, for they are allowed no lives of their own. Louise Mallard was overjoyed when she heard that her husband was killed in an accident, and began to hope and dream again for the first time about what the world might be like as a free human being. She no more regretted his death than Walter Mitty would have been upset over the sudden passing of Mrs. Mitty, but drops dead of a heart attack only when he ends up coming home after all. In fact, this story was based on the actual death of Kate Chopin's own father in a railroad accident and the feeling of sudden freedom and liberation that it gave to her mother. Walter Mitty is an ironic and satirical reversal of this type of feminist writing, since in Thurber's story the husband is the 'feminine' character who is trapped by marriage and social convention when he would really rather be off alone having some type of male adventures. Only on the surface is Walter Mitty a charming or humorous character because the reality under the surface is that he lacks any identity of his own, and is trapped in a routine, modern life of domestic tasks. Mrs. Mitty is like radio static or background noise that he tries to tune out, since she is a control freak and authoritarian, who not only tries to 'mother' him but control his every thought and move. Whenever he shows the slightest sign of independence, imagination or personality, she suggests that he is must be 'sick' and should see a doctor or have his temperature taken. Both of these stories present an extremely bleak and hopeless picture of marriage, gender relations and domestic life in which the main characters would truly rather be just about anywhere else.
In the classic 1939 short story by James Thurber, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," Mrs. Mitty, lacks even a first name and is nagging, thoroughly unpleasant wife,. Walter simply tries to escape from her into a fantasy life of a great surgeon or war hero, anything but dull normality of his life. Many of Thurber's stories featured wives who were "the stereotypical nagging, niggling partners (which was objectionable to modern feminists) who browbeat their husbands" (Greenberg and Watts, 2009, p. 252). In satirical and humorous American fiction, from Rip van Winkle on into the 20th Century, wives like Mrs. Mitty are conservative and "unimaginative upholders of the status quo, who serve as foils to the boyish imaginations of men; their stern common sense makes them dull and unimaginative" (Walker, 1988, p. 43).
Mrs. Mitty has a large number of unpleasant characteristics which come out whenever she intrudes on Walter's fantasies and daydreams, which never involve her. She is a backseat driver who complains that she does not like him to go more than forty miles per hour, and suggests that he should see a doctor. As usual, Walter hardly listens to her at all and she appears to be "grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd" (Thurber, 1979, p. 203). She tells him how to dress, cautioning that "you're not a young man any longer," complains when he sits in an old chair at the hotel, and when he does not wear his overshoes. When he asks "does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking," she responds that she is going to take his temperature when they get home. In short, Mrs. Mitty has a talent for making even those ordinary domestic chores thoroughly unpleasant, which is why he "he hated these weekly trips to town -- he was always getting something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb's,...
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