Women Before the Feminist Movement

The era before the modern feminist movement was extremely difficult for women. How would you feel if you were expected to cook, clean, and watch children all day, every day? Guy de Maupassant's Mathilde Louisel of "The Necklace" and Kate Choplin's Louise Mallard of "The Story of an Hour" were upset by the lack of control they had over their own destinies and tried to take initiative in their lives. However, their dreary, monotonous lives seemed all the worse after their brief brush with freedom.

Louisel was dissatisfied with her life even before her brief turn of luck. She felt superior to her husband, as she manipulated him into buying her a dress. Her husband treated her like royalty despite her hatred for him. Alas, she could not love such an ordinary man for she felt deserving of the splendor of queens and yet knew that she was destined for shambles. Her good looks contributed to the gap in her heart, for they accentuated the mere randomness of whether one lives a life of poverty or luxury. When such a hapless specimen as her got a chance in high society, she tried to live it up as best she could. So when she sank so rapidly below her previous low, her life-force took a hit as if she climbed up a staircase from the first floor to the third, jumped out an open window, and fell that much farther to the ground.

Louise Mallard was much less of a dramatic figure than Mathilde Louisel. Unlike Mathilde, who dominated her husband, Mr. Mallard quietly conquered Louise. He most likely did not yell or scream but simply took the household roll of patron. Louise was thus subdued to the lowly position of wife. Unlike the proud Mathilde, she had not an inkling of her own suffocation until she received liberation from her withholder. If perhaps Louise had known herself - her wants, her feelings, her aspirations - for as long as Mathilde had known hers, she might have better handled the despair; but unlike willful Mathilde, she had not what it took to hold in the pain and move on. Mathilde had the ease in doing something wrong and therefore could stand to bare the load. But Louise had the burden of committing not a crime and therefore was crushed by the melancholy doom that would be the rest of her life. She could not stand the agony of living a half-life for no fault of her own.

What happens when you take two elegant, free spirits and put them in confining marriages? The fortunate one becomes "the sort of woman, hard and coarse, that one finds in poor families." And the unfortunate one, she dies of the realization that her life is not her own. This is how the multitude of hardships that Mathilde and Louise were forced to endure crushed their spirit into shards of sorrow and regret.