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The Dinner Party Story

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Recommended: Gender roles in literature

If you are a woman, you will never be as brave as a man. This statement obviously cannot be proven, and this point is shown in a story called “The Dinner Party”. In the story, a dinner is being held in India with the topic of conversation being the amount of nerve control that men and women have, and an argument stirs up when a young girl disagrees with a colonel’s statement that men have more nerve than women. Meanwhile, a male guest attending the party sees bait for a snake and realizes that a cobra is in the room. Although the man remains calm and traps the snake in the end, it is revealed that the cobra had crawled across the hostess’s foot and she had just shown an example of perfect control, thus proving the colonel wrong. In the short …show more content…

This is revealed on page 10, stating, “‘Mrs, Wynnes, how did you know that cobra was in the room?’A faint smile lights up the woman’s face as she replies: ‘Because it was crawling across my foot.’” Toward the end of the story, it is revealed that Mrs. Wynnes had encountered the snake before the American naturalist realized it was in the room. She had, instead of screaming and causing hysteria like the colonel claimed she would, calmly addressed the situation by calling for a young boy to set bait for the snake in order to lure it away from the guests. By doing this, Mrs. Wynnes disproved the colonel’s statement that women perform lesser than men while reacting to a crisis by showing him firsthand.
The colonel in “The Dinner Party” generalized the capability of women based on their gender, and in the end of the story he was proven wrong when the guests discovered that the female hostess had encountered the snake and remained calm. This showed the guests that women can maintain the same composure as men. Based on evidence from the short story, the author conveys that making assumptions based solely on gender stereotypes will often will often be proven

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