The Treatment of Women in Seventeenth Century

Since the beginning of time women have been treated as lower class. Women were controlled by their husbands and did not have any rights. In “A Story of an Hour” written by Kate Chopin and “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner the authors use their fictions to describe women lives and their treatments in seventeen centuries.

Both main heroes in those stories are victims of their family and society. As Mrs. Mallard was a victim of her husband, Miss Emily Grierson was a victim of her father. In “The Story of an Hour” Chopin does not show us that Mr. Brently did not love his wife or abused her, but we contribute the fact that she did not have happy marriage with him even that “she loved him- sometimes”. She takes his death as a blessing. Now she has “Free body and soul is free!” Now she notices things in her window that she never noticed before; new spring life, delicious breath of rain in the air, and patches of blue sky. I do not view Louise’s reaction to her husband’s death as a wrong way to react. She lived in a society, which does not view women as “living things”, society, in which man is the “God” and whether you want it or not, you have to obey. No one really knows early in the story how Louise really feels about her husband’s death. Everyone expected Louise to weep with agony and pain, but instead she goes to her room and calms down: “There stood, facing an open window, in a comfortable, roomy armchair.”

In “A Rose for Emily” Faulkner presents Emily’s father as an abuser. He controls her like a horse, never allowing her to date anyone: “None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily”. She did not have any rights to communicate to the people and it completely isolates her from the rest of the humanized word. So, when her father died the town people were glad: “being left along, and a pauper, she had become humanized”. She cut off her hair, because her father does not have any control over her anymore. For the first time in her life she felt free even though she was already thirty years old. I think that Homer was Emily’s “rose”, her love, her passion. She wants to have something that she never had before. She wanted to keep this “rose” for her forever and she killed him, because Homer is “not the marrying type man”.

“The Story of an Hour” and “A Rose for Emily” showed us terrible and unrespectable treatment of women in the seventeenth century. The authors vividly showed that women at that time did not have any right against the men, very often they were victims of their own family and society.