Theme Of Marriage In The Necklace And The Story Of An Hour

“Marriage can be viewed as the waiting room for death” Mike Myers. In the narratives entitled The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant and The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin, both writers create a depiction where people who decide to create this lifelong promise of matrimony somehow die internally. In The Necklace, Madame Loisel is married to clerk and is dying socially because she cannot have what the other women have. She becomes so hateful towards her husband that she allows him to sacrifice all they have so that she can look as pretty as the other women at the ball. In comparison, The Story of an Hour Mrs. Mallard also feels trapped by her husband. She feels extremely caged in that when he died, she actually felt this feeling of relief. She …show more content…
Ms. Mallard somewhat resented her husband because he made her feel like a prisoner. “And yet she had loved him—sometimes. Often she had not.” She could not see that her husband only treated her in such a way because he loved her. Therefore, she died when she found out that he was alive. If she loved her husband truly she would have died of sadness because he was no longer with her, not at the thought of him being alive. This one-sided love caused her to feel trapped in her marriage and in the end killed her. In The Necklace Madame Loisel hated her husband. She had no ounce of love or respect for him. “She looked at him out of furious eyes, and said impatiently: And what do you suppose I am to wear at such an affair? He had not thought about it; he stammered: Why, the dress you go to the theatre in. It looks very nice, to me. . ." The way in which she responded to her husband after he went through so much trouble to get the tickets showed that she did not appreciate his efforts. That she could not look past the life they lived in order to see that she had the very thing she wanted, a man that adored and loved her. Consequently, she made her husband lose everything he worked for to make her happy. “He mortgaged the whole remaining years of his existence, risked his signature without even knowing if he could honor it” and he never received a thank you from his wife. She was so prideful that it made her lose everything. If she …show more content…
Both wives looked at their marriage as prison and their husbands were like guards to them. Hindering them from doing the things they wanted or living a life which they felt they deserved. Ms.Mallard was already dead internally because she felt as though her husband was restraining her from living her life. Furthermore when she found out he was dead she was internally freed. Later on in the story Mrs.Mallard dies because she could not fathom the idea of her husband being in control of her life again. One would assume that death allowed her to keep her freedom. Even though people believed she died of a heart attack, in reality she died because she was afraid of being in bondage again. That was implied from the last line when Chopin says, “When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of joy that kills.” In the Necklace Madame Loisel died emotionally from the moment she married her husband because she believed she deserved more in life. She did not believe her life had value, “she was as unhappy as though she had married beneath her;” She longed for something she had and that was the attention of man. Both women died emotionally because of their marriage and the restraints they believed it had on them. Mrs.Mallard her unhappiness literally killed