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Little girls are expected to
dream of their wedding days |
Throughout time, women have been under pressure to meet
certain expectations.
Women are
bombarded with opinions from friends, family members, and even strangers about
how those people think women should live their lives.
I’ve read countless articles about women with
children at the grocery store being approached by other women criticizing the
way that they are treating or dealing with their child.
How often do men claim authority over women’s
bodies when they don’t even know how the female body works?
People everywhere have preconceived ideas
about what women should and shouldn’t do and they force those ideas on women
all the time.
Young women especially are
under constant fire from people telling them what to do.
I feel as if I can’t escape the pressure of
people’s expectations of me because I am a woman in my twenties.
I am told by advertisements, movies, and
other people that I should be dreaming about my wedding day, thinking of future
baby names, and taking care of everyone else’s needs before my own.
My sister, who has been with her boyfriend
for three years, is constantly bombarded with the question, “When are you
getting married?”
Now that she is 24
years old, holds a bachelors degree, and has a fairly steady job at a magazine
she is expected to get married.
Marriage
is one of the hottest topics in terms of expectations of women (see the post
titled “What Would Eedi Do?” for further discussion of marriage).
The issue of marriage appears throughout many of Edith
Wharton’s novels and short stories. At
the heart of marriage in her stories is the idea of female sexuality and all of
the underlying issues that go along with it.
Some of those ideas include purity and innocence, which are connected to
morality as a whole. The idea held by
Edwardians, and Westerners of any time pe
There is a double standard to this belief. Men endure no snide looks or haughty whispers
if they are outwardly sexual. Men are
not seen as bad people because they have had sexual experiences outside of
marriage, but their female partners are.
These ideas about sexual innocence are not limited to young, unmarried
women; even married women are expected to maintain a certain level of naivety. If women use their bodies or knowledge to
manipulate a situation for their own advantage they are seen as overly sexual
and improper.
riod, including today, for that
matter, is that if a woman has any sort of sexual experience or is unashamed of
her sexuality, she is somehow immoral.
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A photograph of young Edith Jones
(later known as Edith Wharton) |
The issue of female sexuality is heightened by the class
system.
Expectations of female sexuality
differ based on social and economic status.
Lower class women have less stringent expectations placed on them by
society because they often have to work to provide for themselves and their
families.
As members of the work force,
women are more worldly and exposed to more than upper class women who sit
around all day gossiping and playing cards.
Higher-class women who stay in their homes are expected to remain pure
and unaware of the horrors of the world and of things that might ruin their
precious innocence.
They should be sweet
and selfless and kind.
As mentioned
earlier these traits are associated with pure, sexless women.
The relationship between female sexuality and class are
interwoven in Wharton’s short story “The Other Two.” In the story, Waythorn, the protagonist, gets
to know his wife Alice’s two ex-husbands.
He does business with her second husband Mr. Varick, who is fairly
wealthy and is aggressive in business and in his social interactions. Waythorn is not particularly fond of Mr.
Varick, but he doesn’t dislike him. Waythorn soon finds that Alice’s first
husband Mr. Haskett, with whom she has a daughter, has always been poor, and is
even more so now that he has left his job and moved to New York so that he can
be closer to his daughter.
Assuming her to have been the wronged partner in her
divorces, Waythorn pities her for her supposed innocence. Because of his predisposition to assume that
women are innocent and unable to protect themselves against or stand up against
men, he believes Alice must have somehow been the victim in an unhappy
marriage. He thinks of her as naïve and
in need of being rescued by a wealthy, intelligent man of the world. He
doesn’t think of her as a divorced woman – instead he thinks of her as a
helpless girl who was wronged by one man and needs to be saved by another. After he meets her ex-husbands, he gets to
see who they truly are. He sees that
while Mr. Haskett is poor, he is a soft-spoken, kind and caring man. Alice did not leave him because he was
abusive or neglectful. So she must have
left him for some other reason. She then
went to Mr. Varick, who is somewhat abrasive, so it is more obvious to both
Waythorn and the reader why she would have left him. But we wonder why she married him in the
first place. This shows Waythorn that Alice
was not actually a victim in her marriages. Each of her marriages was in fact a stepping-stone
in reaching a higher level of economic and social standing.
Wharton reveals Alice’s ascent through the classes with
diction that she uses to describe Alice.
She describes Alice as “the pretty Mrs. Haskett whom Gus Varick had
unearthed somewhere” (17). Keep in mind
this is narrated through the bias of Waythorn.
So not only does it reveal Waythorn’s classist viewpoints, but it also
shows how far up the class system Alice has traveled. Varick brought her from the depths of poverty
into the sunlit world of society. It is
only through their relationship that Alice was allowed into upper-class
circles. And she is very successful in
this. Wharton states, “Alice Haskett’s
remarriage with Gus Varick was a passport to the set whose recognition she
coveted, and for a few years the Varicks were the most popular couple in town”
(17). While Wharton does come out and
say that Alice wanted to advance in social status and that her marriage allowed
her to do so, the reader does not assume that this was her sole reason for
marrying Varick. Because this is only
the second page of the story and Wharton has otherwise only introduced Alice
through the honeymoon-clouded eyes of Waythorn, we as readers don’t think much
of her social advancement. We don’t
assume that she uses her marriage as a tool.
We merely look at her status change as a perk. It is only as Waythorn leaves the honeymoon phase
and gets to know his wife and her ex-husbands that he and the reader are able
to infer that Alice planned her marriages so that she could gain wealth and
status.
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| Annie Leibowitz's imagining of "The Other Two" for Vogue, September 2012 |
In seeing her journey up the social ladder through her
marriages, Waythorn loses the pure and innocent lens through which he saw Alice
before getting to know her ex-husbands.
His
ideas about her as a divorced woman change, and he no longer sees her as
needing to be saved- instead he sees that she made conscious decisions to
divorce as a means of gaining what she wants.
He now buys into the stereotype that divorced and sexually experienced
women are too worldly for their, and his, own good. Alice uses people to get
what she wants.
Waythorn begins to see
her as a cunning and manipulative social climber.
Cunning and malice are two adjectives that are
easily and often used to describe sexually promiscuous women in literature and
in general during Wharton’s lifetime – arguably even still today.
Edwardian ideas about women’s sexuality and classism might
seem strict, but they shouldn’t seem that unfamiliar. The fact of the matter is these ideas are
still highly prevalent today. Women in
authority who exert their authority are seen as “bossy” or “bitchy” while men
in the same position are seen as “strong” and “respectable.” Why do people dislike women who speak up for
themselves? Why are women who do not get
married and have children seen as selfish?
The stigma of divorced women that Wharton presents in “The Other Two” is
still existent today. Divorced women are
not necessarily less desirable to men as they once were. But divorced women who date are often judged,
especially if they have children. People
often think that divorced women should devote all of their free time to their
children, because they should be nurturing and selfless. They then go out of their way to make those
women feel guilty for wanting to be loved by someone other than their
children. Why are women who are open
about their sexual experience “slut-shamed” while men who do the same thing are
revered? Because people today still
expect women to live up to the expectations that were held during Wharton’s
lifetime. They are afraid that women will
claim their own autonomy and rise up out of the lower status position that they
have been placed in. Society still
believes women should be sweet, soft-spoken, family-oriented, naïve, and
helpless. Because he believes women
should be this way, Waythorn assumes his wife was naïve and helpless in her
first two marriages. He then gets to
know her and realizes that she accomplishes the goals that she sets for herself
that are not dictated to her by other people, so his view of her decreases. Just like in Wharton’s time, society still
dictates what a woman should and shouldn’t do because society believes that
women are incapable of making decisions for themselves. Everyone thinks that they have to tell the
naive, helpless woman what is best for her.
