Women's Restrictions Of Women In The Age, By Toni Morrison

While Wharton and Morrison focus their novels around women’s restrictions in society, they also empower their characters through sometimes passive, yet powerful actions to overcome barriers. Morrison’s strong female character, Mrs. Breedlove, repeatedly stood up to her abusive husband. She sporadically married Cholly, a drunk who abandoned his societal role as the breadwinner and spent his days at the bar. To make herself feel better, Mrs. Breedlove would spend her days at the movies and emulate white actress Jean Harlow. Morrison exhibits the woman’s power to dictate her own life through Mrs. Breedlove, who refuses to allow her husband to destroy her moral. Passively, she fought back by clanging pots and pans in the kitchen. A seemingly harmless act, but it spurred her anger.

Breedlove resisted her husband, “He fought her the way a coward fights a man—with feet, the palms of his hands, and teeth. She, in turn, fought back in a purely feminine way—with frying pans and pokers, and occasionally a flatiron would sail toward his head,” (Morrison 43). The woman’s power and intelligence is similarly shown in The Age of Innocence, but more passively. May suspects that her husband, Archer, is having an affair with her cousin Ellen. Using one of her only controls, May tells Ellen that she is pregnant, before she is even sure. Without realizing until later, Archer discovers it is Mary's pregnancy that drives Ellen back to Europe. Through May’s actions, Wharton displays the female’s ability to find strength and a way to resist oppression at a time when many rights were not afforded to them. Mrs. Breedlove and May allowed the authors to speak through characters to show the power and ability that women possess. This is Wharton and Morrison’s method of communicating to their audiences that there was a general repression toward women, but they still found was to rise above and fight