Literatura

Analysis of the marriage in Her Letters, by Kate Chopin

The short story “Her Letters”, by Kate Chopin, presents a woman who has a package of letters that are very dear to her, love letters from a relationship that ended four years before. She has the thought of destroying all those envelopes by burning them in the fireplace, but after burning some letters, the pain is so strong that she doesn’t want to burn the rest of them. So, she ties all these letters together with twine in a bundle and leaves the package to her husband, with a note that asks him to destroy it without reading the letters. Sometime later, when she had already passed away, the husband finds the bundle of letters and, although he wanted to know the content of the letters, he ends up respecting her deceased wife’s desire. Being so bewildered about such letters, the husband decides to destroy them and throws the whole package in a river. After that, he starts thinking about what was written in those letters and searches for people who knew her wife to ask them about her. However, the husband was getting more and more disturbed. Eventually, when he couldn’t handle it anymore, he decided to join his wife and the letters by jumping into the river to die.

In this short story, we have only two characters: a woman and a man, both unnamed. The duality between these two characters is constantly being reinforced through the story, but some points of that must be held into account. Firstly, there is a social inversion between the woman and the man. In some parts of the story, the narrator reinforces the idea of a cold, distant, and untouchable woman, who didn’t really love her husband but was still a good wife. On the other hand, the husband is described as a loving and sensitive man, who hasn’t doubted his wife’s loyalty until the moment he finds the letters.

Even so, the man’s lovely behavior doesn’t seem to stop the woman from exchanging love letters with a stranger and holding on to them for four years after she stopped, which means that, even though he was lovely, he wasn’t enough for her, or, this amiability of him was only a smokescreen for hypocrisy and a miserable marriage. Anyway, putting a woman as the cheater - a position usually occupied by the man - and the man suffering and getting paranoid, expresses an unconventional female protagonism for that time.

Taking a closer look at the story, it is possible to observe some things regarding the symbolism, starting with the number of years the woman was cheating on her husband, for instance. The number four stands for stability and foundation, which could represent those years in which he believed in the solidity of her loyalty. Yet, in Japanese culture, there is a superstition that the number four is linked to death, and this could also relate to the story, given that the woman died after those years, and as consequence, so did her husband. We can also see that the narrator mentions the fire when talking about the woman’s actions, while the water is constantly present in the man’s actions. It all starts when the woman’s first solution to destroy the letters was burning them in the fireplace, while the man’s first option was to throw them in the river.

In addition to reflecting their personalities, fire and water also represent purification. When the woman cannot burn the letters, it is revealed that what she actually cannot get rid of are her sins and betrayal, but also the good memories of that relationship, so she had to ask her husband to purge her soul after she was already gone, and so he did, but in his own way, destroying the letters and purifying them with water. This catharsis, however, leads him to his end. Another meaningful aspect about these two elements concerns the power relationships within their marriage, showing, in a possible interpretation, the erasure of the woman due to the oppressive husband figure - the water that extinguishes fire.

Viewed this way, another question arises: why did the woman cheat on her husband? In no way do we wish to justify a betrayal, but rather to understand reasons that might have led her to do so. When questioning the possible reasons for it, we return to a point mentioned before - what if the husband was only kind to the others, but not to his wife? Did he actually know her, once he asks other people about her? These are some questions because, in theory, no one who is in a happy relationship, and who loves their spouse would cheat on them.

Furthermore, “Her Letters" shows a subversion of the husband’s psychological reaction. When the man discovers the affair, he stops trusting people around him as his lucidity is gone day by day, driven by jealousy, and that marks a break away from the narratives from the period, in which the women would be characterized as paranoid. In this case, we see the effects of doubts in his behavior towards his friends while he questions her loyalty. Even though he doesn’t completely trust her anymore, he never opens the letters, keeping with her last wish. In fact, for him, it was easier to destroy the letters than to face the truth.

Quite the opposite, he can only wonder why his wife decided to take this secret to her grave, and the burden of doubt became a curse to him. If the husband had opened the letters, the truth about the adultery would have come out, but instead, he chose to blame her for dying with a secret, martyring himself. This blame projection on the woman can also be seen as a sign of his behavior in the marriage, and towards her. In the end, this existential conflict ends up suffocating him, as he has to bear the fact that could never get an answer, causing him to commit suicide. His death can be seen as the day of reckoning, since, perhaps, in the post-life, he will finally know the truth and his wife.