A Definition

When we were reading those essays on Hamlet and had to write blog posts on some of them for homework, I wrote a post on Friedrich Niezsche's essay, The Birth of Tragedy, which can be found here. In this essay, Niezche discusses the Dionysian Man. I, not knowing what this was, proceeded to look it up in an online dictionary and continue my post. However, upon entering class the day the blogs were due, I was told off for using a dictionary definition as opposed to the definition that the author supplied.
I will not make the same mistake twice.
In Kate Chopin's The Awakening she discusses marriage and the roles of husband and wife quite frequently. Chopin also defines marriage and these roles for the time period of her story. At the beginning of chapter three is where I found the most explicit 'definitions'.
The marriage is a partnership, not a union of love. The husband and wife are colleagues. They do not show affection for one other.
Though colleagues, the husband and wife are not equal. The husband has every right to feel "discouraged" when coming home late from a night out, waking up his wife, and only receiving half-hearted responses to his conversation (22). The husband may also forget promises made to his children, as Mr. Pontellier "had forgotten the bonbons and peanuts for the boys" when he came home from the hotel (23). However, if the wife should say that the children do not have fever (when they do not indeed have any fever) whilst the husband declares that the children do have fever, the husband's word is taken to be accurate despite evidence from the wife. The wife is expected to tend to the 'ill' children as the husband reproaches "his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children"as he smokes (23).
The wife is "the sole object of [the husband's] existence," as Mr. Pontellier aptly puts it when he comes home from the hotel and is disappointed to find his wife asleep and uninterested in what he has to say at 11 o'clock at night (22).  She is the caretaker and the nurse of the entire family, not just the children. The wife is the martyr who takes the care to blow out the candle "which her husband had left burning" as she slips outside at midnight to cry until her sleeve no longer dries her tears, for a reason that "she could not have told" (22). The wife accepts episodes such as the above because they are "not uncommon in her married life" (22).