The plight of women in destructive, toxic marriages is an interesting one in fiction; literature has a way of illustrating the fundamental inequalities that exist in overbearing relationships between men and women, especially when society favors one gender over the other in terms of privilege. In Zora Neale Hurston’s short story “Sweat” and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the women in these relationships are beset upon by harrowing forces of domination and victimization. Their husbands abuse them in either overt or subtle ways; Delia in “Sweat” is regularly beaten by her husband, while the unnamed narrator of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is isolated in the form of a ‘rest cure’ by her physician husband, eventually driving her crazy. Comparing these two stories together, “Sweat” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” have very similar perspectives on toxic marriages, though “Sweat” offers both perspectives in the marriage, as well as a more determined and rebellious wife character.
The couple in “Sweat” is able to tell their own individual sides to the tale – both Delia and her husband Sykes are given the option to narrate the story and say their piece. Delia is a poor, black woman who has a job washing clothes so that she can provide for herself and her husband (who does not work). Sykes is abusive and condescending, resorting to physical violence often when it suits him, and forces them to do what he wants even when it spells doom for their marriage. Delia is mostly passive during these spells, since she would not be able to physically stop such a large, domineering man; when she sees him with a whip at the start of the story, “A great terror took hold of her. It softened her knees and dried her mouth so that it was a full minute before she could cry out or move” (Hurston, p. 25). She does occasionally rebel against him and stands up for herself, but it does not really stop him – he just beats her again, and the cycle continues.
Conversely, “The Yellow Wallpaper” shows the marriage strictly from the wife’s perspective, and their particular injustices are just as much a symptom of medical ignorance as they are about patriarchal expectations of men and women. In this story, a young woman, presumably suffering from postpartum depression, is encouraged to take a rest cure by her husband, John, at a friend’s summer home. Here, she is locked up in a room and encouraged to do nothing and see no one. The room itself becomes a metaphor for her marriage, one in which she has no agency; it “looks as if it had been through the warsBut I don’t mind it a bit,” showing that the narrator makes herself okay with the room/marriage, even though it is less than ideal (Gilman, 1973). The fear of men is tied with the wrongheaded nature of medical science; the medical basis of the rest cure is spurious at best, and men use this overbearing knowledge of medicine to control women. “John says if I don’t pick up faster he shall send me to Weir Mitchell in the fall. But I don’t want to go there at all. I had a friend who was in his hands once, and she says he is just like John and my brother, only more so!” (Gilman, 1973). John himself seems to not care about the problems his wife is going through, instead taking this as a chance to prove his mettle as a doctor by effectively experimenting on her by doing the rest cure.
In both stories, the wives manage to defeat their husbands, though the reasoning and methods for doing so differs somewhat. In “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the narrator goes completely mad by the end of the story, believing there are people in the wallpaper, growing more paranoid and distanced from reality. She starts committing herself to the room, and eventually her hysterics drive John to faint, allowing her to escape. In “Sweat,” Delia learns that Sykes has suffered a fatal snakebite, but chooses to let him die instead of doing anything about it. While she does not actually murder him, her inaction is seen as justified because of the horrors he has inflicted on her. In that way, both women allow their abuse-driven madness to end their husbands, but Delia’s is much more overly malicious, while the narrator simply loses her mind.
In conclusion, “Sweat” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” tells the story of how a wife can often be subjugated by her husband. Patriarchal ideas of the man being the head of the household and the ultimate authority over their wife spells disaster for everyone involved. “Sweat”’s marriage leads to the death of Sykes and Delia’s freedom and revenge; meanwhile, “The Yellow Wallpaper”’s narrator loses her mind completely due to the isolation of the rest cure, knocking her husband out and escaping his clutches. Both stories show how the stifling conditions put on women by marriage can oppress and subjugate them, particularly when male domination over their wives becomes the norm.
References
Gilman, C.P. (1973). The yellow wallpaper. 1st ed. New York: Feminist Press.
Hurston, Z.N., and Wall, C.A. (1997). Sweat. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
