A Gentle Creature

A detailed Summary of A Gentle Creature

On one level, "A Gentle Creature" is a love story. However, instead of fulfilling romantic ideals, "A Gentle Creature" portrays a battleground. Instead of a tale of mutual happiness through mutual submission, it tells of a power struggle between the narrator and his wife. Despite the fact that the husband possesses all of the story's narrative time, it is his wife who, through her death, eventually triumphs. The entire tale is the futile attempt of the narrator to regain the power he loses when his wife commits suicide.

There are many examples of how the narrator attempts to control his wife-not only throughout her lifetime, but from beyond the grave. For example, the text never provides the reader with a name for the narrator's wife. Thus, she exists in the text only through her relationship to the narrator. On that basic level, she is denied her own individuality. Although the narrator himself also goes nameless, this namelessness does not imply the same lack of control. Because the husband possesses all of the narrative force within the text, his refusal to provide a name is irrelevant to the power struggle inherent in "A Gentle Creature." Unlike her namelessness, the narrator's is his own conscious choice.

By narrating the tale of her life and death, her husband is able to absorb the entirety of the tale's narrative time. In a sense, he is given the power to reshape his wife in any manner that he chooses. He is free to shift the reasons for his wife's suicide in any way that he pleases. His final desperate attempt to control her comes with his delusional thought of keeping her corpse with him always. "For if they take her away...But no! I shan't let them! I'll be damned if I let them!"(P 713). The fact that he realizes that he must allow the corpse of his wife to be removed reveals his final understanding of his loss of power. He cannot keep his wife's dead body beside him; he cannot control her corpse as he controlled her living self.

The wife's final triumph over the narrator occurs in her death. The icon-like way in which she frames herself in the window could be construed as a subconscious acceptance of her role as an image. Yet at the same time, she refuses to assume a role as an object of worship. By dying, she loses all the possibilities of power inherent in a living form. Yet in death, she places herself entirely beyond the power of her husband. It is this action that leads the narrator to tell the story of "A Gentle Creature."

What the narrator doesn't count on is his wife's ability to remain silent. Although he perceives this silence as a sign of her submission, it is a passive-aggressive attempt to keep him from truly touching her life. The narrator finally gets an inkling of

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1022
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English