Struggles To Be Free Of the Patriarchal Household

Both James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield offer us stories about women who want to be free of patriarchal rule, and who seem to be given a choice to do exactly that. Ultimately though, neither of the women in these stories can make the choice to be free. Why not?

Is the choice given to them really a choice? To find out, Joyce and Mansfield have given us stories about women that focus on issues in their personal lives that lead up to their final choices.

Each woman comes from a patriarchal household that controls their worlds. That control can be seen by their economic, social, familial, and personal dependence on the men in their lives. In both stories that man is their father.

Eveline herself is working class. She has a job but very little money. She will never be economically independent. She will always have to work. Within her current job she is often belittled. She never challenges her situation, but maintains it so that she can continue to feed those she considers to be her family.

Economically Constantia and Josephine don't seem to be in dire straits. There is no sign that because of their father the Colonel’s death, these women are totally impoverished and must rely on others to support them. That gives them at least the possibility of economic freedom unlike Eveline.

Eveline is lower on the social scale, but social issues do still matter to her. What do others think of her ("what will others say?") (Longman Anthology, 2335) is a question she asks herself. She wants respect for herself.

But she will always be her father's daughter or Frank's wife. She will never just be Eveline. As the property of a man she has no true personal standing in the social area.

Eveline has Frank but doesn't seem to have anyone else. This means no friends and no support system. She is a woman in total isolation, a woman who faces her decision alone.

We don't actually know Constantia and Josephine's place in society, but we know that their father was a Colonel and they are probably middle to upper middle class.

Others in the story give you the idea that they are not really considered marriageable. We don't really know how others perceive them so we don't know for sure that they have totally been written off by society.

They are also very aware of social position. Everything they do reflects that. What other people think and the appearances of things matter a great deal.

They respond to the threat of social ostracism if they step out of their assigned roles in life. While writing notes to others, Josephine writes "We miss our dear father so much"(2267) about 23 different times.

Through habit and conditioning they have done their duty for so long that only their social roles exist. They even believe themselves that they are sorry the Colonel is dead and can repeatedly show that grief.

As actual persons, these women simply do not exist for anyone but each other. They share that common life together. Unlike Eveline their choice can be made together rather than alone in isolation.

They are very aware of social position and duty, but they also genuinely act out of personal generosity. They do so in several places in the story. They want to give their father's hat to Porter. "We ought to give him a present too. He was always very nice to father (2266).

They even "asked Nurse Andrews to stay on for an extra week as their guest" (2268). Even though they "had to have regular sit-down meals at proper times," even knowing that they would rather it was just the two of them. Then they might be able to get Kate to bring "them a tray" (2268) whenever they chose to eat.

Both stories have a mother that is missing from the scene. Constantia and Josephine have lost their mother so long ago that she is rarely thought of. Things are different for Eveline. Joyce added a death-bed promise to her mother that still controls her actions in life.

It is probably true that the one close relationship Eveline has had in her life was with her mother. This would be a promise that looms larger than just about anything else in her life.

All 3 of these women are fairly capable of taking care of things in the private sphere. Eveline runs the house and makes major decisions at work. She seems to be able to make decisions for everything and everyone but herself. She has a lot of trouble with this one. So do Constantia and Josephine. None of them can seem to reach inside themselves and tap into their own needs. They are not self aware.

Eveline even calls on divine intervention. "She prayed to God to direct her, to show her what her duty was" (2337). But ultimately she is left alone to make the decision to marry and leave with Frank, or to stay where she is. She has not yet considered the possibility of a whole new start. Perhaps she is unable to even consider it.

Joyce gives her a chance to compare her options: a new place versus the traditions in her life. Can she live with the aloneness that would take her to an unknown world and away from everything she knows?

"Perhaps she would never see again those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed of being divided" (2335). Was that what she really wanted? She knows she doesn't love Frank. It's about finding an escape, a way out. But when it presents itself, she is unable to do it.

For Eveline there is the very real threat of violence from her father. "She had nobody to protect her" (2336) from the man who should be protecting her. Could she just leave? Well patriarchy has created what seems to be a great built -in control over women: personal guilt.

There is an internal social control at work here: guilt. Eveline is mired in it. She reflects on her deathbed promise to her mother about keeping the family together, and she censors her feelings about Frank and what's really going on.

There is tremendous guilt about her actions because Frank really has been nice to her.

When guilt is working on her, she minimizes the harsh treatment she gets at home from her family. She is often told that her life at home is increasingly hard, "but not wholly undesirable" (2336).

She does have happy memories of her father. But is this also a case of trying to convince oneself that staying at home is a right decision rather that a bad mistake?

Mansfield gives us two women who just might actually have the chance to be free of patriarchy rule except for one thing: they need to give each other permission to make the decision. Unfortunately the abuse and gendered violence perpetrated by their father has effectively taken the idea of self or personhood away from these women.

Constantia and Josephine's last memory of their father is his glaring at them with one eye when they came into his room just before he died. He didn't seem to think what they were or what they did was ever good enough.

A lifetime of the Colonel was enough to render these women unable to make any kind of decision at all. His verbal abuse, threat of violence (they always heard the thump of his cane inside their heads), sense of confinement, and control of all their resources is designed to make these women feel inferior.

In this and other time periods that is true. Women do feel inferior. Violence, or even simply the threat of violence has enough potential to destroy a woman's sense of self, especially in this time period when that self rarely gets developed early on in life.

It is true that there are women who do eventually come to this realization in their life. The question is, will other factors keep them from acting on that.

Eveline is just now aware of self. She wants to know why she can't have a life. She has come to realize that "she wanted to live" She questions why her life should be unhappy, after all," she had a right to happiness" too (2337). Did she really want her mother's "life of commonplace sacrifices" (2337)?

An Awakening of the self, the desire for something as yet unknown is an experience that Constantia also has. It is a womanly lunar experience that could offer great strength. Constantia is given this awareness, but it is only implied that Josephine has had a similar experience.

After all, these women are two halves of the same whole. They recognize something within but they don't have enough sense of self to give themselves the freedom they need to choose a life that they really want rather than the life their father allowed them to have while he was alive.

Control of these women would have simply been a part of patriarchal rule in the early 20th century. Today we would call what happened to these women gender violence or abuse. Men have strength and use the "might makes right" argument to suppress and control what they fear in women. And that control can be mental, physical, and/or emotional.

The gender violence done to women in the name of patriarchy may not have been needed, but it was the icing on the cake of the maintenance of patriarchy. The psychological effects of that violence hold back all three women in these stories.

Eveline does show a woman who thinks that underneath everything else in her life, she just might be a person in her own right. But Joyce leaves you with the idea that Eveline is too tightly caught up in the "net" "the trap" that is Ireland as a Nation, and Catholicism as a religion have dictated (2332).

Add to that the harsh abuses of family life that have limited Eveline’s scope of thought to the point where she simply can’t make personal happiness her choice. Perhaps it is a trap that leaves women incapable of independent action.

Joyce explores this in Eveline. I would never call him a feminist but he has given us the beginning of a feminist argument used today--that all our institutions contain within their foundations both a patriarchal and a racial viewpoint that traps women and limits their choices from the moment they are born.

Mansfield suggests that same idea. For her, even with the awakening of a sense of self in an individual, under the constraints of patriarchy or total control by men, there will be no escape from the patriarchal household until an acknowledgment that while men and women are different; women are human beings just like men.

Women need to give themselves the permission to believe that idea before they can make important choices and decisions in their lives strictly for themselves.

Work Cited

Damrosch, David. Gen. Ed. The Longman Anthology of British Literature. Vol. 2. New York. Addison-Wesley Educational Publishers. 1999.