Gender Roles and Irony in Chopin and Maupassant's Heroines

Introduction: Women Confined by Domestic Expectations

For centuries, women have been associated with domestic life. This association was especially persistent from the Middle Ages until the mid-twentieth century — and some could still argue that it continues even today. Most women did not have choices when it came to what they were going to do with their lives. It was largely a given that they would marry, bear children, and take care of the house and family. Women, for the most part, were considered second-class citizens — second to the men in society. However, just because this gender role was a societal norm does not mean that women did not have their own dreams and ambitions for lives outside of domesticity. These dreams and ambitions were merely stifled.

Furthermore, on many occasions, women were forced to marry men whom they did not even love, simply because marriage was expected of them and many took the first opportunity that came along. In Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace," this is the exact scenario exhibited in each story. Both Louise Mallard from "The Story of an Hour" and Mathilde Loisel from "The Necklace" find themselves stuck within the strict confines of gender roles that they do not enjoy — roles that they rebel against, even if they are not entirely aware of doing so. Both yearn for something else and refuse to accept that they must live a life they find stifling and demoralizing. Sadly, however, both women are able to see their dreams come true — if only fleetingly — only to have them snatched away once again by a cruel twist of fate. Both Louise and Mathilde's stories are tragic in that they are undone by extraordinary circumstances that leave them reeling in an unjust aftermath. Both stories lead to the conclusion that the roles society has assigned them are far more difficult to escape than either woman could ever have imagined.

First Impressions: Unhappiness Established from the Opening Lines

In the first line of "The Story of an Hour," Chopin (2002) writes: "Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death" (p. 756). De Maupassant (2012) begins "The Necklace" with: "The girl was one of those pretty and charming young creatures who sometimes are born, as if by a slip of fate, into a family of clerks" (p. 1). From these opening lines, the reader immediately gets the impression that both women are deeply unhappy. One suffers from a heart problem that, as Chopin implies, is not so much a physical ailment as others in the story assume, but rather "a sign of a woman who has unconsciously surrendered her heart (i.e., her identity as an individual) to the culture of paternalism" (Jamil, 2009, p. 216). The other seems born into a world she believes she was never meant to inhabit. Both women would be better off living a life other than their own.

Mathilde anguishes over the middle-class lifestyle she has been born and married into. De Maupassant (2012) writes: "She had no gowns, no jewels, nothing. And she loved nothing but that. She felt made for that. She would have liked so much to please, to be envied, to be charming, to be sought after" (p. 2). Mathilde suffers so greatly from her circumstances that she cannot even visit a wealthy school friend, because the contrast between her friend's life and her own plunges her into depression upon returning to her dreary home. Maupassant's narrative technique "allows him to lay bare his character's inner life" (Bell, 2010, p. 783), and from the beginning the reader senses that Mathilde is a woman trapped — both literally and figuratively — in a life she loathes.

Brief Glimpses of Freedom and Desire

What Louise and Mathilde share is that both are given a small taste of what their hearts desire — admiration and social recognition for Mathilde, and freedom and individuality for Louise. Mathilde gets the opportunity to attend a ball in a gorgeous new dress, adorned with a beautiful diamond necklace borrowed from a friend. She dances the night away while being admired by men and women alike for her gown, her jewelry, and the extraordinary beauty that seems to blossom from her happiness in the moment. She is convinced that this is the sort of life she was meant to live.

Louise Mallard's predicament differs from Mathilde's in that Louise never truly questions her life with her husband until the day she is told he has died. Once she learns that her husband has perished in an accident, she begins to think about all the freedom she has missed and all the freedom she will now possess. Fate has given Louise a new lease on life — one in which she will be free to make her own decisions and be her own woman. She becomes exuberant, overcome with joy and promise as she imagines this new life without him.

When Louise's sister breaks the news of her husband's death, Louise cries in her arms, then retreats to a room alone. Sitting quietly, she soon realizes that another feeling is beginning to take hold — one that is neither suffering nor simple sadness. "There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air" (Chopin, 2002, p. 757). This feeling unnerves Louise, and she even attempts to push it back — as a dutiful wife might — yet she cannot control it. When she finally surrenders to it, she is startled by the word that comes to her again and again: "Free, free, free!" (Chopin, 2002, p. 757).

Irony, Fate, and the Crushing of Dreams

Mathilde believes she will find her own sense of freedom in the luxuries of wealth. She thinks that because she was born with physical beauty, she is entitled to "all the delicacies and all the luxuries" (De Maupassant, 2012, p. 1) her heart desires. She resents the middle-class life she is compelled to live with her husband, and though Maupassant never has Mathilde say so explicitly, her resentment is palpable. If she had married better, perhaps she would not be in the predicament she faces when she must borrow a necklace to wear to the ball.

It is deeply ironic that it is precisely Mathilde's yearning for luxury that drives her further into misery. She borrows her friend's necklace only to lose it after the ball. As a result, she and her husband must exhaust their savings and take out loans to replace the beautiful piece. It takes them ten years of long, hard, menial labor — labor that strips away all of Mathilde's physical beauty until she is unrecognizable to her former acquaintances. When she finally encounters the friend from whom she borrowed the necklace, the friend reveals that the piece was a mere imitation. Mathilde and her husband have replaced a fake with real jewels and spent a good portion of their lives in servitude to pay for it.

Maupassant's storytelling is notably clever here, and the message he seems to convey about women like Mathilde is pointed. Society had led Mathilde to believe that because she was beautiful, she was destined for greater things than a modest middle-class life. Yet Mathilde could not even distinguish a real diamond from a fake. One might ask whether Maupassant is making a broader statement about Mathilde herself — that though she appeared to be "the real thing" at the ball, all dressed in her fine gown and jewels, she too was something of a performance, because the woman others admired that evening was not the woman she truly was. After the ball, Mathilde did not even have a proper coat to wear over her dress.

Louise, meanwhile, has an hour of supposed freedom after learning of her husband's supposed death. Chopin (2002) tells the reader that Louise "had loved him — sometimes" — but "often she had not" (p. 757). Chopin (2002) writes: "There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow creature" (p. 757). Louise realizes that she will have authority over her own choices, with no one able — even unwittingly — to bend her to their will. Chopin (2002) continues: "A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination" (p. 757). Here Chopin seems to be arguing that whether a man exerts his will over a woman through abuse or through gentle paternalism makes no fundamental difference — it is still one person controlling another.

This is the moment at which Louise becomes fully aware of how completely she has been locked inside rigid gender roles throughout her marriage. Like Mathilde's night at the ball, however, Louise's freedom is devastatingly short-lived. Shortly after her illumination, a key turns in the front door: it is Brently Mallard, her husband — entirely unaware that there had been any accident. It is his return that kills Louise. The doctors record her cause of death as "heart disease — of joy that kills" (Chopin, 2002, p. 758).

Both Mathilde and Louise endure profoundly ironic outcomes — outcomes that feel simultaneously absurd and fateful, carrying the suggestion that when it comes to breaking free of their prescribed gender roles, neither woman ever stood a real chance. Mathilde can pretend for a night, but it is her belief that she could transcend reality that sends her plummeting deeper into despair and drudgery. For Louise, she is not even aware that another life is possible until she receives the news of her husband's death. In that single hour of believing him gone, she becomes enlightened and powerfully conscious of everything she might do and be without him. She becomes aware of his oppression — not because he is cruel or abusive, but because she grasps that a man need not be cruel in order to keep his wife from living a life that is truly her own. It is the realization of what she has missed and the recognition that she will never have it — now that he has returned — that kills her.

Conclusion: The Persistence of Gender Oppression

Some have certainly questioned the character of Louise: "Is the degree of 'self-assertion' or freedom that she thinks she has attained a real possibility in a world of normal human relationships?" (Deneau, 2003, p. 211). This may be a natural reaction for some readers encountering Chopin's (2002) story. However, for those who respond this way, it is fair to ask whether their reaction is itself shaped by the societal roles they adhere to in their own lives. Louise is not selfish — one cannot be selfish about something one did not even know existed. Louise is awakened, enlightened, made suddenly aware of everything she should have had, that men possess as a matter of course, that she has been denied because of her sex.

Perhaps the same cannot be said without qualification about Mathilde, but Mathilde faces her own particular form of imprisonment. She is a prisoner of her femininity and of what society has told her women are supposed to want and to be. Both women's stories, read together, offer a powerful indictment of the gender structures of their era — structures whose echoes, as this analysis has shown, have not entirely faded even in contemporary life.

References

Bell, D. (2010). Maupassant and the limits of the self. Romantic Review, 101(4), 781–801.

Chopin, K. (2002). Kate Chopin: Complete novels and stories: At fault / Bayou folk / A night in Acadie / The awakening / Uncollected stories. New York, NY: Library of America.

Cunningham, M. (2004). The autonomous female self and the death of Louise Mallard in Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour." English Language Notes, 42(1), 48–55.

De Maupassant, G. (2012). The necklace and other short stories. Germantown, PA: Empire Books.

Deneau, D. (2003). Chopin's the story of an hour. The Explicator, 61(4), 210–213.

Jamil, S. S. (2009). Emotions in the story of an hour. The Explicator, 67(3), 215–220.

Mayer, G. H. (2010). A matter of behavior: A semantic analysis of five Kate Chopin stories. ETC: A Review of General Semantics, 67(1), 94–100.