Mental Health Issues In Wharton's Ethan Frome

Mental health issues affect a large number of people, and become more rampant with other factors such as economic status, race and oppression. Society expects a man to be strong, and working to bring home money. While the woman is supposed to be the homemaker, mother to and take care of the house, the family, and her husband. Those regarded outside the gender binary are further discriminated for not applying themselves to a gender role and having a different gender association or not going with the gender and the role they were assigned at birth. These stereotypes and expectations on people due to their gender and gender identity, then impact their mental health. Mental health is greatly impacted by gender due to society’s prejudices, and pressure for gender to full fill their assumed gender roles. Gender …show more content…
As the minor sex to the male dominance the woman’s role has been to cook, clean, take care of the house and children stereotyping women as weaker. You can find examples of this archetypical woman in countless works of literature. One specific example in Ethan Frome, the younger and more desirable woman in the novel is described as young, cheerful, and pleasant, but only able “to trim a hat, make molasses candy, recite ‘Curfew Curfew shall not ring to-night,’ and play ‘The Lost Chord’ and a pot-pourri from ‘Carmen.’” (Wharton 43). The discrimination women face is not only apparent in fictional characters, but in essays Roxane Gay describes her experience as a woman, “On my more difficult days, I’m not sure what’s more of a pain in my ass-being black or being a woman...the persistence of lawmakers trying to legislate the female body, street harassment, strangers wanting to touch my hair” (17). The overall discrimination women face from being labeled weak, to being governed by a male body, and comprehensive harassment rationalizes the magnitude of mental illness women