Defying Domestic Duties

Defying Domestic Duties During the Victorian period, society was upheld by rigid social and moral values, with ideal forms of masculine and feminine behavior. Moral respectability and domesticity were important ideologies of feminine behavior. The woman’s mission was that of a supportive wife and caring mother and her domestic role was seen as an important and essential part of society. However, Kate Chopin’s main character, Edna Pontellier, in her novel, The Awakening (1899) and Jane Campion and Kate Pullinger’s protagonist, Ada McGrath in The Piano (1994), exhibit behaviors extremely unusual for women whose lives had such strict boundaries. Both Edna Pontellier and Ada McGrath deviate from their domestic responsibilities in terms of motherhood and marriage, and it leads to severe consequences for them as women in Victorian society. Throughout these two novels, Edna and Ada find ways in which they can cast off the unpleasant wife positions that they have felt forced to accept. The conventional idea of a woman in the Victorian period was to be the property of her husband and relinquish all her power to him. The ideas of wives becoming their husband’s property and giving them rights to what their bodies produced, whether it be children or domestic labor comes, from the strict fathers and absent mothers of Edna and Ada. Kathleen Streater’s article, “Adele Ratignolle: Kate Chopin's Feminist At Home In The Awakening” says, “We can assume that Edna's framework for motherhood has been dictated by her harsh father, and thus a stifling, oppressive masculine ideal left undiluted by a mother's influence and concrete example” (412). Streater makes the point that Edna did not have a mother growing up to show her the proper domestic roles that she would need to fulfill once she was married. Greg Bentley’s, "Mothers, Daughters, And (Absent) Fathers In Jane Campion's The Piano” explains, in comparison, that Ada’s father thinks of her as just a sexual object to be exchanged.