The Roles of Women

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.

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.

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.