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The Story of Avis and Women in Early America

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Published: 06Jan2010
Word count: 546
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Throughout the novel, The Story of Avis by Elizabeth Phelps, the author shows the reader her own opinion on being a woman in the eighteenth century. To do this she creates a character that holds the opinion that she would never want to become a married woman, because married women are not allowed to pursue their own dreams or endeavors. The main character, Avis who is an inspiring painter, marries in the novel and by marrying shows the decline of her other loves in lives, just as she predicted before marriage. Thus, the writer is showing the reader a pretty blunt hypothesis; marriage destroys women by trapping them. She shows this even further by constantly giving the reader the image of a caged bird.

The main character, Avis, is one that is simply against being the typical female stereotype, which is seen in the very beginning of the novel when she was a little girl. When she ask her father if she can attend a lecture he replies, "It is proper that little girls should learn to sew and cook," and she is clearly defiant to her aunt telling her it is un-lady like to hate by saying, "If it is, then I'd rather not be a lady. There are other people in this world than ladies." As the story progresses, however, this view of Avis is slowly destroyed by the bird imagery. Although, she does not want to be a proper lady, she is still forced into the role. The reader sees this through the use of bird imagery by the author. "We are apt to think of a bird as rather an open-hearted, impetuous creature, telling all she knows, pouring out her private affairs to the whole world's hearing by simple force of her nature. In fact, perhaps no creature is more capable of concealment," this quote shows that the bird is the symbol of freedom, and since it is almost always associated with Avis, she is the center of freedom. This freedom is destroyed, however, by a man, the man whom she marries. The reader learns that this freedom is destroyed when her future husband kills a little bird she was trying to protect as he convinces her to marry him. This shows the Avis, the bird, being destroyed.

Upon marring the reader realizes Avis herself has been destroyed, when the reader sees the Avis the wife come to be instead of the Avis who paints and uses her talents, "Her thought stepped out like a disembodied spirit, and took a survey of herself, as she sat there on that boat, -a hollow-eyed woman, past her first youth, economically dressed, come thirteen hundred miles to nurse a consumptive husband—as was clearly her duty—through the winter." Avis is not allowed to be what she wanted to be, she is now officially the caged bird, caged by her husband's wants and needs.

In the novel by Elizabeth Phelps, The Story of Avis, the writer makes the beautiful connection between a woman and a bird to show her own hypothesis about marriage and what it does to women. Phelps believed that marriage destroyed a woman's freedom and ambition, which she shows through the bird imagery used in The Story of Avis.

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