Female Martyrdom explained

What happens

Themes in this chapter

• Love and Marriage

  Mary's internal struggle reflects the societal expectation that marriage is a woman's only career, and her broken engagement leaves her feeling incomplete.

• Hypocrisy and Moral Courage

  Mary demonstrates moral courage by deciding to separate from Walter for his own good, even as she suffers deeply, and she rejects the 'mock modesty' demanded by society.

Characters to notice

• Mary Lowther

  Mary is deeply wretched after breaking her engagement with Walter, feeling broken and fragmented, yet she bears her sorrow well outwardly.

• Captain Walter Marrable

  Walter is at Dunripple hunting, though with a lugubrious air; he is less consumed by sorrow than Mary, partly due to his active life.

• Janet Fenwick

  Janet writes a letter to Mary from Bullhampton, describing her misery over the chapel construction and urging Mary not to let her past love ruin her future.

• Miss Marrable

  Miss Marrable has written to Mrs. Fenwick about Mary's well-being, noting that Mary is more silent than before.

• Parson John Marrable

  Parson John reports on Walter's hunting activities, hoping to prove to Mary that Walter is not dying of love.

Key passages

• “In this matter of disappointed and, as it were, disjointed affection, men are very different from women, and for the most part, much more happily circumstanced. Such sorrow a woman feeds;⁠—but a man starves it.”

  Men and women handle heartbreak differently: women dwell on their grief, while men are more likely to suppress it through activity.

  The narrator contrasts Mary's lingering sorrow with Walter's ability to distract himself through hunting.

• “When a girl asks herself that question⁠—what shall she do with her life? it is so natural that she should answer it by saying that she will get married, and give her life to somebody else. It is a woman's one career⁠—let women rebel against the edict as they may; and though there may be word-rebellion here and there, women learn the truth early in their lives.”

  A woman's primary purpose in life is marriage, a truth that even those who rebel against it eventually accept.

  The narrator reflects on the societal expectation that marriage is a woman's only career, which shapes Mary's sense of loss.

• “The Indian, indeed, allows herself to be burned through a false idea of personal devotion; and if that idea be false in a widow, how much falser is it in one who has never been a wife.”

  It is even more misguided for an unmarried woman to sacrifice her future for a lost love than for a widow to practice sati.

  Mrs. Fenwick uses the analogy of sati to argue that Mary should not let her broken engagement define her life.