The short story “Souls Belated” is about Lydia Tilloston. Through the story the reader learns, Lydia is in a boring marriage with an uptight businessman from New York. She is faces oppression in her marriage and her life at home. Inevitably she falls is love in someone else and leaves her marriage. Ralph Gannett is her escape and her love, she flees are totalitarian life to live with him freely. She soon files for divorce but yet refuses to marry Ralph. In the paragraph, near the middle of the story is when the story truly unfolds. Lydia expresses her feelings regarding marrying Ralph. Lydia tries to explain her point by shedding light on the true meaning of love, her view on marriage, and the end of a spark in their relationship if they were …show more content…
Lydia does not see marriage as an equal partnership instead something that is just expected of women at the right time. Furthermore, unlike society she does not think it the whole matter is anything honorable “If she had Patton 2 never, from the first, regarded her marriage as a full cancelling of her claims upon life, she had at least, for a number of years, accepted it as a provisional compensation, she had made it ‘do’.” In Lydia’s eyes married women are nothing but prisoners bound by the laws of society. It can be seen as a self-created jail a person willingly walks into for the rest of their lives. However, she has an eye opening realization that even within marriage she has control over her life and she can always escape her boundaries set by society. The text constantly implies that married women do not need to be concerned about their freedom, their only worries should be their children and fashion. Men are the ones in society deserving of freedom and therefore may do as they wish. “It was the kind of society in which, after dinner, the ladies compared the exorbitant charges of their children's teachers, and agreed that, even with the new duties on French clothes, it was cheaper in the end to get everything from Worth; while the husbands, over their cigars, lamented municipal corruption, and decided that the men to start a reform were those who had no