Welcome to my ranting session!
Clearly the entire story is about how discontent and greedy Madame Mathilde Loisel is. All she did was think about how much better life could have been if she had married into a rich family, but considering how a woman's status was perceived in that time, is she really wrong to dream of having everything which makes her the so called "perfect woman" she wants to be? The biggest flattery she could receive is being "wanted", something that's well established in "high" society.
All that admiration, all that awoken yearning, all that
complete victory that is so dear to a woman’s heart.
I wonder who made that up!
One of the scene goes :
It was Madame Forestier, still young, still beautiful, still seductive.
Pure misogyny. Only good enough if she is still young, beautiful and seductive, but at the same time the author shows Mathilde in the bad light because she wants to be one too?
I do agree that Monsieur Loisel is okayish to some extent but I really lost it at this sentence :
He had saved up that very amount to buy himself a rifle and go hunting that summer on the plain of Nanterre, with friends who’d be shooting larks on Sundays.
So he can have all the fun himself, huh? What kind of hypocrisy is this? I bet even Madame Loisel would like to go out by herself and have fun on Sundays but the author totally undermines that because she is a woman.
Also we could have avoided all this if we just used the following source and sold it later at a high price.
Loisel had eighteen thousand francs that his father had left him.
The ending leaves you the impression of 'Madame Loisel finally learnt her lesson', but do you not see a woman being responsible and accountable for trying to pay back the debt she has "trapped herself" in with her husband?
Madame Loisel looked old now. She had become the strong, and hard, and crude woman of poor households
The author himself says it too how strong she has become after 10 years but once again under the negative light. It's filled with misogyny, sexism and male chauvinism and how a woman is supposed to just shut up and bear it if she can't have it.
ashnoir commented...
I remember reading this story in school and the way she was described ten years later was so off putting to me! I get the kind of message this story was trying to portray but it could have done that without having such misogynistic undertones. Calling a woman shallow for caring about societal validation and then proceeding to do the same (judging and comparing women on the exact same societal expectations) is so misogynistic. Also, it’s how society will always ridicule a woman for wanting to fit into societal standards, criticise the ones who won’t and then proceed to judge them all on the basis of the very same thing. I like what you said about the Sunday thing. That’s actually so true, because when I read such stories I always realise how they treat women like secondary human beings. They’re expected to be compliant and serve those around them, and them having any desires for themselves is shown in a bad light.