Loucura, vislumbre e resistência em contos da literatura estadunidense: Gilman, Chopin e Hurston

Abstract

This study presents a reading of the short stories The Yellow Wallpaper (1892), by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Story of an Hour (1894), by Kate Chopin, and Sweat (1926), by Zora Neale Hurston. We focus on the power dynamics between husband and wife presented in the three works and their most distinctive implications in the lives of its protagonists. Initially, in the first two stories, both main characters do not deal with the type of oppression that can generate an insurgency by their husbands in the social context of the time when the narratives take place. They are not physically abused, and their partners bear the roles considered essential for a husband: provider and protector. Nevertheless, they feel oppressed, since the reality of the marriage they face limits their life possibilities, reducing them to domesticity. In the last story, we deal with much more poignant matters: race and class. If in the first texts marriage presents itself as a problem, due - among other factors - to inactivity, in this story we see that work is presented for the protagonist, a poor and black woman, as an obligation, as her only alternative for survival. Thus, she is forced to deal with a husband who not only does not support her due to her profession and does not help her to support her home, but also tends to be physically violent with her and to prey upon her patrimony, a factor that the other white and middle-class protagonists do not even consider dealing with. In this sense, we will seek to show how women in the above-mentioned narratives are harmed by systematic oppressions in relation to issues of sex, race and class, and, for this, we will use the theoretical and methodological contributions of Treichler (1984), Wisnieswki (2012), Butler (2016), Collins (2016), Davis (2016) and hooks (2019).