Sidoinne Collette's The Hand

2 Pages 421 Words

The Hand
Since the early 1900s, women have been stereotyped to be the homemaker. The one who takes care of the children, cooks, and cleans. Some women quietly take their place in the home once married, but others have ideals the marriage will be different and more equal. In Sidonie Colette’s, The Hand, the bride reformulates her opinions about gender roles in marriage during the 1920s after discovering her husband’s hand, and what it represents.
“I’ll tell him not to varnish his nails” (Colette 229). The quote expresses the bride’s equality to the man, the fact that she has a say in what he can or cannot do to his nails. The young bride is very excited to be starting this new “scandalous life of a newlywed”. She believes marriage is a joyous joining of two people that begins a life of partnership. “She proudly bore the weight of the man’s head” (Colette 228). As the story moves on, she discovers this hand, the hand of her new husband, and it is “big, larger than my whole head.” She compares the hand to a king crab and a knife. She cringes at the fact she’d kissed that very hand. The wife then discovers her true role as a new wife, to be submissive and controlled. “Then she concealed her fear, bravely subdued herself, and, beginning her life of duplicity…..she leaned over and humbly kissed the monstrous hand” (Colette 229).
As the bride’s perception of the hand changed, her perception of the man changed as well. She no longer saw him as her knight in shining armor but as an animal, who’d come to control her. She was frightened by the hand and what it represented. The setting
reinforces the intrusion of her life. They are lying in their bedroom together. We think of our bedrooms as a sacred place where we can get away from anything going on in the outside world. Now she is scared in her bedroom, an intrusion of reality. The reality that she does not know anything about the man she is now going ...