This short story by Edith Wharton illustrates a woman's duty to her husband even in the hardest hours. However, even love and duty in the truest sense can't stop a woman from wishing herself free of such a burden as tending to an ill husband. This story contains a conflict of duty and finding oneself as a woman.
The wife's struggle with freedom and duty are prominent from the very beginning. She is becoming weary and tiresome of her husband's illness. Because her husband was ill, it was her obligation to take care of both her husband and herself.
"His voice has grown very weak within the last months and it irritated him when she did not hear. This irritability, this increasing childish petulance seemed to give expression to their imperceptible estrangement."
"She was too impenetrably healthy to be touched by the irrelevancies of disease."
"A year ago their pulses had beat to one robust measure; both had the same prodigal confidence in an exhaustless future. Now their energies no longer kept step: hers sill bounded ahead of life, preempting unclaimed regions of hope and activity, while hes lagged behind, vainly struggling to overtake her." (Wharton, 104)She doesn't blame him for his illness but she does blame the illness for their estrangement but she continues on because she loves the man she married.
"She felt herself beset with difficulties too evasive to be fought by so direct a temperament. She still loved him, of course; but he was gradually, undefinably ceasing to be himself. The man she had married had been strong, active, gently masterful: the male whose pleasure it is to clear a way through the material obstructions of life; but now it was she who was the protector, he who must be shielded from importunities and given his drops or his beef-juice though the skies were falling." (Wharton, 104)That night, on their train journey home, she thought she hear him call. She worried that if he called, she could not hear him or feared that the room was too silent for her husband to be breathing. Her duty as wife was to keep him comfortable and safe.
When she awoke, her husband was dead. She was afraid to let anyone know of her husband's death because they would surely put her off of the train at the next stop. She couldn't be abandoned in an unfamiliar place with a dead body. She could not be free during his life nor after. Her duty even still was to care for herself and care for her husband.
September 25th, 2014