The Unknown Future of the Respectable Woman, Mrs. Baroda

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Yusuf Yazıcı İstanbul Şehir University 16.07.13 “A Respectable Woman” is a short story put on paper by Kate Chopin who is an American author living between 1850 and 1904. The story tries to help the reader to question how a respectable woman needs to act, whether in accordance with the desires of society or only herself. The protagonist of the story, Mrs. Baroda, “falls in love” with her husband’s friend Gouvernail, and she has to repress her emotions, for she perceives herself as a respectable woman. Even though she then tells her husband that “she has overcome everything”, it is crucial that one needs to think what “overcoming everything” means. In the very beginning of the story, it can be understood that Mrs. Baroda thinks that she really loves her husband since “she was looking forward to a period of unbroken rest, now, and undisturbed tete-a-tete with her husband”. However, when Gouvernail appears, Mrs. Baroda realized that there was always something incomplete in her life. In a Turkish way of thinking, what she has lived until that day was a “sevgi”, not an “aşk”. These words substitute for the word “love” in English. Briefly, “aşk” can be described as a deep and irresistible love while “sevgi” has no that much deepness. Mrs. Baroda likes Gouvernail mostly for his personality and she discovered some different characteristics at him that she could not discover at her husband. She is interested in how Gouvernail “did not care to fish, and displayed no eagerness to go out and kill grosbecs when Gaston proposed doing so”. Perhaps she didn’t like that Gaston always fishes and kills grosbecs and was happy to learn there are differences at Gouvernail. He “was as courteous toward her as the most exacting woman could require”, which is another reason why she liked him. Also, Mrs. Baroda tells her husband that she wants Gouvernail to leave giving

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