Escaping from the Cage

Minnie Wright fell into social conformity when she married Mr. Wright. At that time it was expected that you marry, a woman without a husband was seen as an outcast. But the worst part was that once she did marry she lost herself to the expectations of a wife and woman at that time. She lost her happiness, her joy, her smiles, and most importantly her love to sing. These expectations that her husband held for her, led her to become a person she would have never thought she would have become. "That rocker didn't look in the least like minnie Foster- the Minnie Foster of twenty years before. It was a dingy red, with wooden rungs up the back and the middle rung was gone, and the chair sagged to one side," Susan Gaspell used the chair as an example of what had happened to Minnie once she married Mr. Wright. He looked down on her, seeing her only as an asset instead the person she really was. There was no equality between them, he held himself higher than her, and that was not going to change. But these were all things that were expected at that time, women were not seen equally, and men were not expected to see women other than as their house maid and mother of their children.

Killing her husband (although that is not the right thing to do) was the only way she could really escape from the darkness of being confined in the cage of her marriage. At that time it was looked down to divorce your husband, actually it was probably not even allowed. Because if a woman brought up the idea to leave her husband he would see that as a way of taking his authority away, the authority only males were able to have at that time. Anyways, Minnie was stuck in a trap of gender expectations at that time, bringing her to ultimately snap and kill the man who had taken away her spirit.