I both read the story and listened to the play, and I was struck by the very different focuses the two had. In the play, the big focus was on the mother-child relationship. She was forever asking to hold her child, you hear the child crying in the background frequently, the nature of the room as nursery was very strongly presented, and her primary concern about her husband was his keeping her from her child, and only secondarily her keeping her from her work and writing. In the story, the child was almost totally absent, and the focus of her discontent was, I felt, almost exclusively on his limiting her right to be creative and express herself.
While you're right that the women on this thread would mostly rebel against being treated as she was, from what I know of my social history it was representative of husband-wife relationships 100+ years ago, and even today there are, I think, a lot of marriages where that philosophy is alive and well. I see some in my practice even to the present day. So I think it works as a modern as well as historical story. |
