International Journal of Language & Literature

Escape from Servitude of Marriage to a Heaven of Freedom in Kate Chopin and Katherine Mansfield's Selected Stories
Mohammed Matarneh, Hussein Zeidanin

Abstract
This paper questions the patriarchal institution of marriage and critically examines Kate Chopin and Katherine Mansfield's feminist perceptions of marriage. Like other first wave feminists, they denunciate marriage for domesticating, objectifying and marginalizing women. The fictional women in their short stories accordingly rebel against the social order relegating them as wives and mothers, ensuring their submission and loyalty to their husbands, and stereotyping them as objects of sex and pleasure. Their conception of inter gender relations undergoes a substantial change in the course of the struggle they wage for freedom from the constraints of marriage. They have become aware that the solitude and loneliness of spinsterhood, divorce or death are more tolerable than the servitude and subservience of marriage.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v5n1a12