Role and Treatment of Women Essay

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Society looks at women's bodies to define their happiness or unhappiness, but Chopin suggests that women must look deeper into their psyche to find the cause of their personal difficulties.

Women become scapegoats for what is wrong with society. Women are eternally 'misread' by those who claim to love them because they are only seen in terms of their physical or married life. Mrs. Mallard dies of horror when she sees that her husband is alive but his apparent resurrection from the dead is assumed to have stopped her heart with "the joy that kills" by the doctors who examine her body. They cannot conceive of the idea that a lack of freedom, rather than a lack of a man might make a woman miserable. Although Armand is himself of mixed race, as is revealed at the end of the story, it is Desiree who must suffer and is blamed for her child's race because of her gender.

Women bear the brunt of society's hypocrisies because male fantasies are projected upon them -- either of male indispensability as in "The Story of an Hour" or ideals of female chastity as in The Awakening.

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When female passion, as in the case of the short story "The Storm" can exist outside of social knowledge, it does not harm anyone. In this story, the married woman Calixta and her former lover Alcee engage in a tryst, but the emotional fallout is no more serious than the storm that throws them together, because no one is the wiser.

The female body and female desire for Chopin is not problematic -- it is the way that men read women and project social conventions onto female bodies and female behaviors that is damaging. Doctors and husbands alike do this and constrain what is innately human about even the women they love. However, if women were allowed to freely exercise their desire, Chopin suggests that the world would be a much happier place.

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