Cult of Domesticity Essay

Wo men faced many restrictions during the 1800s based solely on their gender. The Cult of Domesticity served as a basic guide that explained the allow styluss women of this time period were expected to act. It essentially laid come out of the closet four proper characteristics women had to portray piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. Many authors captured the difficulties in a chars life with having to deal with such strict expectations in their writing.These include Emily Dickinson with her poems I mat a funeral in my brain, This is my letter to the earthly concern, and These are the days when the Birds come back, Kate Chopins The Story of an time of day, and Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper. These pieces of literature proved womens make do to live with the pressures of the Cult of Domesticity, and society itself. Emily Dickinson herself was a very odd, secluded muliebrity and that expressed her thoughts with her poems. In I felt a funeral in my br ain, Dickinson writes And I and silence some strange race/ wrecked, solitary, present (15-16).This is a prime practice session of the solidarity that held her captive and caused her descent into madness. Her poem is a cry out for help, but macrocosm the submissive muliebrity she was alleged(a) to be, she hid away her feelings while still acting weak and inferior. A nonher example of submissiveness can be put wholeness overn from her poem This is my letter to the World. It starts polish off This is my letter to the world/ That never wrote to Me (Dickinson 1-2). She is again crying out against the iniquity that the world never wrote to her, or acknowledged her because of her sex.As a woman she was constantly in the shadow of a man and at that placefore did not matter. From These are the days when the Birds come back, Dickinson wrote Thy consecrated bread to take/ and thine immortal wine (17-18). Her allusion to the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist enforces piety. Women nece ssary to incessantly act as the handmaidens of God, to repent for the sins of Eve in the elder Testament. Religion was a big enforcer of a womans quiet way of life and acted as something to occupy their time at home with. Emily Dickinsons struggle with societys expectations is greatly sh take through her poetry.Dickinsons many poems were great in number, but creates only one part of the perspective from a woman about the Cult of Domesticity. In Kate Chopins Story of an Hour, young Mrs. Brently Mallard discovers the intelligence of her economises death. Once the shock and grief wear off, she comes to an important realization. innocent(p) Body and soul free (Chopin 2). Louise finally is free, without her husbands lift bearing down on her and out of the clutches of domesticity. She no bimestrial needs to act like the perfect wife at home, constantly taking care of the house and looking after her husbands every need.She can live for herself like she ever so wanted. There would b e no powerful will bending hers (Chopin 2), and she would no longer be the victim of submissiveness. Her husband no longer had the superior power, which all men were granted at the time of birth, to control and dictate her every transmit to the point where she was just like a small child that needed guidance and direction. But, in the end her joy is all for naught. Brently is not dead. And Mrs. Mallard, when receiving the news of his return, dies of heart disease (Chopin 2).The thought of being pushed into that submissive state of being that she had just escaped from ultimately caused her premature death. Chopins character Louise was a lot like the narrator of Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper in regards to their relationship with overpowering husbands. John laughs at me of course, but one expects that in a marriage (Gilman 1). The narrator acts with submissiveness as she accepts that she is inferior to her husband, he is always right, and she is just the silly woman. She feels she must take his lead and constantly espouse because that is how society wants her to feel.Her opinion does not matter at all, and she even states instantaneously I dont like our manner a instant (Gilman 2). She detests the live, with its ugly, yellow wallpaper and barred windows, but since her husband says it is the best mail service for her she just, once again, accepts it and does not say another word on the subject. The room she would like to sleep in was prettier and airier. But John said that there was only one window and not room for two beds (Gilman 2). This not only reinforces her submissiveness, but also her purity as a woman. The narrator, though married and a mother, sleeps in a different bed from her husband.This is not to keep her gift safe anymore, but to keep from tempting him and to insure the rest she needs to recover from her anxiety. Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were all talented writers and advocates in their own w ays for the struggles of women with the Cult of Domesticity in the 1800s. Each accomplished a way to present a light into the minds of the women who were being suffocated by the mens superiority. Emily Dickinson created poems full of solemn and even remorseful moods that mirrored depression and repression that women felt because of societys expectations.Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman created characters that not only used the same smother repression, but empowered their women by taking the men out of the equation. wholly then were their characters given a chance Louise without Brently and a small insight of freedom, and the narrators ability to finally creep along the room in peace when John faints. The Cult of Domesticity was a cause for womens repression but also their strength and growing stand to the unfairness of the preaching they were being dealt for so long.