Compare/Contrast Essay Final Draft

Lian Prost-Hughart

Struyk-Bonn

English Literature

3 November 2014

Comparing and Contrasting Women’s Ethics

Different people react to the same situation in different ways. We can see this clearly in the women in Hemingway's The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and in Raymond Carver’s Cathedral. Both women experienced an unhappy marriage, bigoted, chauvinist prejudices, and problems with their self-esteem. Each woman’s life situation was unique to her era and social class, and though they had similar emotional battles to fight, how they fought those battles was distinctive. The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber portrays a steely woman who is actually weak due to her position in society. On the other hand, Cathedral presents a woman who is unhappy in her marriage, and has never really found who she is as an independent person.Though, both women were unsatisfied in their relationship with their husbands, one ended the relationship completely whereas the other was stuck in the past, unable to grow and mature alongside her husband.

 

Margot Macomber is a very wealthy woman, her wealth attained through marriage. She is described by Wilson, her and her husband’s tour guide through Africa, as “enamelled in that American female cruelty;” a facade she puts up to protect herself from others (Hemingway, 5). However, due to an unhappy marriage, she tries to bring about change in her relationship, ending up, instead with the death of her husband. This occurs when “Mrs. Macomber, in the car, had shot at the buffalo with the 6.5 Mannlicher as it seemed about to gore Macomber and hit her husband two inches up and little to one side of the base of his skull” (Hemingway, 22). Whether she was trying to prove that she still possessed dominance over her husband, and tried to shoot the bull to show him up, or she was unable to deal with her husband outgrowing her and could not figure out with a better solution, the author does not specify. Raymond Carver also leaves the audience to wonder about feelings of the wife in Cathedral. As the reader is introduced to the wife of the narrator, one thing is certain: she is unsatisfied with her life. By inviting her old friend Robert, she is trying to achieve something, though it is not disclosed to the reader. From the narrator’s descriptions we learn that she at one point was in love with a her high-school sweetheart, but when that marriage failed she fell into depression and eventually attempted suicide. Later on she remarries, yet she is unsatisfied with herself, always thinking about Robert, a man, and  close friend, she can’t have. Finally she brings him to meet her husband, it is clear that she makes her husband jealous, as he mentions: “I saw my wife laughing as she parked the car. I saw her get out of the car and shut the door. She was still wearing the smile. Just amazing.” (Carver, 4). However, this did not benefit her in the long run. Instead her husband’s horizons are the ones that expand, not hers.

 

Margot and the wife in Cathedral are very similar, in surprising ways; they were both caught in the past. Margot could not let go of her dominance over her husband and ended up shooting him, either by accident or on purpose. Leading up to this climax, Margot’s husband gained confidence in himself, and as his self-worth increased, his interest in her plummeted. Her insecurity is obvious, ““You’ve gotten awfully brave, awfully suddenly,” said his wife contemptuously, but her contempt was not secure. She was very afraid of something” (Hemingway, 21). Coincidently, after Robert draws the cathedral with her husband, the narrator’s wife in Cathedral also becomes unsure about her relationship with her husband. She asks, “What’s going on? Robert, what are you doing? What’s going on?” (Carver, 13). Her uncertainty extends much farther than with to her husband, she is also second guessing her relationship with each man, both her husband and Robert,  individually. She has a very complicated past with Robert. The wife would write poems about how the fingers of the blind man felt as he touched her face. She also would send him messages throughout the year; this alludes to the fact that she was emotionally attached to Robert. Her husband describes her, saying, “Over the years, she put all kinds of stuff on tapes and sent the tapes off lickety-split. Next to writing a poem every year, I think it was her chief means of recreation” (Carver, 2). This may  have been her way of coping with her unhappy life; she would send her stories to someone she looked up to, in a similar way to praying.

 

Though both women are very similar, they reacted to their situations in distinctive  ways. For example, they both faced Machoism, but Margot takes the bull by the horns, and tries to change her future. She has obviously made a decision about her actions and though not completely willing to face the consequences of those actions. “Macomber, looking back, saw his wife, with the rifle by her side, looking at him. He waved to her and she did not wave back” (Hemingway, 21). On the contrary, the wife  in Cathedral does not try to change her future, instead she tries to relive the past by bringing Robert to her home, and is then bewildered and apprehensive with the growth that her husband begins to show. “My wife finally took her eyes off the blind man and looked at me. I had the feeling she didn’t like what she saw. I shrugged.” (Carver, 5). When she first brings Robert home, she is slightly disgusted with the man she married. She chooses to have a negative attitude toward her life, and does not even try to change anything. What happened to her relationship between her and her husband is not revealed in the story, however her ending is, hopefully, happier than Margot’s.

 

Though Margot’s and the narrator’s wife’s situations were similar in that their husbands had outgrown their relationship, their perspective and resulting actions differed greatly. Margot, whether purposely or not, shot her husband and  goes on to inherit his fortune. The wife in Cathedral chooses to remain silent on her true feelings and risks losing her husband when his world view changes into an infinitely more positive one. Whose ending was happier? A question like this one that challenges morals and ethics, is not an easy question to answer. However, it is easy to conclude that each woman did what she thought was best in her personal position, whether or not it was right.