Alyssa Wallingford
November 6, 2022
English 206
QCQ #8
Quotation: “There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow- creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.”(Chopin).
Comment: Like how in Parker, he talks about how Marxists had to recognize that racism fuels economic exploitation and vice versa, and how feminists challenged that the same idea applies for misogyny and economic exploitation. In the case of this woman, in having her husband die, everyone expects her to be distraught, unable to continue on. And she is like this for a while. But then she considers the possibility of living years for herself, instead of for a man. She admits to loving him sometimes, but more often, she doesn’t. By the end of the story, she dies of heart failure, but not from immense sadness, but rather from the sheer amount of joy she experienced from thinking about how she would live her life going forward now that her husband was actually alive. This was the assumption, but I think this has more to do with the gaze of others assuming that was the cause, but I think it was actually from immense sadness at realizing that she was not actually free.
Question: I wonder what other things can be connected back to being linked with economic exploitation. I imagine if you try hard enough, anything can be connected to it in some way, but it is interesting to see how not only does economic exploitation have an effect on something, the same can be said for the other way around. The “flipping of the script” is quite interesting, as it should be acknowledged that most things aren’t a “one-way street”. Is the way we expect this woman to act when her husband dies a form of misogyny in assuming how she will react? Or is it more the associations of the consequences that might come from the death of her husband(assumptions of economic instability, unending sadness, being alone forever, etc.)?
