The Housekeeper

Short Story Comparative Essay
Kate Wang
Student # : 602285
ENG 3U0-E
From the beginning of time, the role given to men has always been the breadwinner and the women as the housekeeper.   These stereotypes have been broken as more women are entering the work force due frustration with their limitations in society.   Women are happier being less dependent on men and more reliant on themselves, opposite to society’s beliefs.   In The Wedding Gift and “The Company of Wolves, Thomas Raddall and Angela Carter show in order to achieve freedom and independence, it is necessary for women to break society’s expectations. Raddall and Carter use characters, locations and symbols to convey this message. The symbols in both stories demonstrate the domestic role of women and how they attempt to gain freedom. Both stories consist of similar aspects of location to emphasize how women are isolated and absent from society. Finally, the characters in both stories achieves freedom only by breaking society’s expectations. Thus, The Wedding Gift and The Company of Wolves both comment on why it is beneficial for women to be independent and break the expectations of society in order to be happy.
To start off, the symbols in both stories represents the domestic role and how women try to break free of society’s expectations in order to achieve freedom.   In The Company of Wolves, the young woman from the village symbolizes the domestic role of women. When the women’s first husband came back, Carter writes, “So a wolf he instantly became and tore off the eldest boy’s left foot before he was chopped up with the hetachet they used for chopping logs.   But when the wolf lay bleeding and gasping its last, the pelt peeled off again and he was just as he had been years ago, when he ran away from his marriage bed, so that she wept and her second husband beat her” (Carter 2). The first husband tore off the woman’s son’s foot because she re-married.   The second husband beat the women for showing...