Rappresentazioni ironiche dell’ideologia della True Womanhood. Il caso di “The Fullness of Life” di Edith Wharton

Abstract

The present essays suggests a new reading of "The Fullness of Life", a short story composed by Edith Wharton in 1893. It is my contention that the critics have devoted far too little attention to this piece, above all by focusing solely on the autobiographical resonance of the text’s subject matter: an unhappy marriage between an idealistic aesthete and an unimaginative and materialistic man. While I do not deny its autobiographical value, I argue that the story deserves more critical attention, especially for what I see as its clever parody of the tenets of the so-called “pious novels”. More precisely, I contend that, by means of a literal and deeply ironic representation of the “domestic angel” metaphor, Wharton captures the conflict between women’s right to self-determination and the expectations of society in the second half of the nineteenth century – a society which objectified women by forcing them into a rigid domestic role dictated by the so-called “True Womanhood”.