A Housewife's Opinions Literary Elements

Collection of non-fiction essays and articles

The physical setting of these essays is less significant than the social setting: the repressive and patriarchal Victorian England in the 1800’s.

For the most part, the essays are written in the second-person point-of-view in which the author situates the subject of the essay within the reader through the use direct address “you” and “we.”

The tone throughout is one light-hearted irony which disguises a pervasive and persistent mood of contrarian principles and moral outrage against the status quo.

The protagonist of these essays and articles can effectively be termed liberal progressive thinking. The antagonist is thus effectively characterized as patriarchal hypocritical Victorian conservatism.

The epicenter of the political and social conflict at the heart of most of the entries in this collection is identified by the author in the essay “Creating Sins.” Conflict in the world mostly arises due to the “good people” of the world, those moralists who insist that the rest of the world adhere to their opinions and “believe their opinions proved true by the fact of their opinions existing.”

Due to the nature of this being a collection of individual essays and articles written independently of each other and focusing mainly on a single subject, there is not “climax” in the traditional sense. What is offered instead is a more abstract concept of anticlimactic outcome: there is no essay which reveals a successful consequence of complaint in a previous essay. By the end, everything remains exactly the same as it has been. The climax in this sense all come afterward through the march of history in which almost all of the complaints have been addressed and socially altered.

With this sense of a climax in mind, the book itself can be said to represent historical foreshadowing. Webster’s calls for awarding of university degrees to women equitable with men, children’s literature that tells an interesting story rather than merely providing moral instruction, employment opportunities for women beyond service and seamstress, and many other progressive calls to action are made. It is Webster’s self-confident assurance that one day these will not seem radical but become completely normalized that is the example of foreshadowing here.

In “Protection for the Working Woman” Webster opens with a massive piece of understatement that covers the entire history of man’s attempt to improve civilization on itself: “There is nothing more difficult than to protect without enslaving.” Thousands of years of practice and people still haven’t figure out how to avoid this conundrum.

As an educated woman who is writing specifically as a means for proving that women can be just as educated as men, allusion is perhaps the author’s strongest tool in her box of literary devices. References are everywhere: Apollo and Hercules become a metaphor for complaints about “having had the wrong keys given to them.” The tale of Jack Sprat and his wife is used to convey the value of a heightened sense of sympathy toward others. Napoleon, Alice in Wonderland, Agamemnon, and many other figures from history, legend and fiction pop up for cameos in this collection.

Imagery through extension of metaphor is utilized throughout these works despite being non-fiction essays on history, politics, economics and culture. A typical example: “Memory is the handmaid of thought. It first collects the materials, then in after days furbishes them. And handmaidens, though not above their mistresses are very necessary for their mistresses’ ease and well being. If the mistress has to do the handmaid’s work she is the less free for her own probably the world the handmaid should have done is the less efficiently fulfilled. Therefore memory should be encouraged to its best, not despised as a brainless drudge”

“Dull People” is an opinion piece which posits the notion that dullness is a paradox. “Dull people never feel dull” because what makes a person dull to someone else is the demonstration of that person’s misplaced confidence in themselves of their own lack of dullness.

Webster provides a recipe for the manufacture of champagne that is a witty example of parallel construction: “take an uncertain amount of ignorance, twice the amount of miscellaneous information; equal quantities of self-assertion, recklessness and joke-making; a double proportion of imitativeness; add a seasoning of shrewdness, tact and irreverence; mix, and you have the effervescence. If you have little else than effervescence, no matter.”

The essays entitled “Keys” turns the title object into a metonym which signifies every aspect related to the process of locking and unlocking things both literal and metaphorical, both boxes and secrets.

The selection titled “Pianist and Martyr” commences with personification of the abstract concept of music, transforming it into a young woman: “When music, heavenly maid, was young, did she practice many hours a day? Did she train her fingers gymnastically?”