Power over Circumstances in Mansfield's "Prelude"
.... Instead, she would dream of escaping, a desire expressed through her fastidiousness and lounging in a chaises longues (Parkin-Gounelas 156), letting nothing “violate her inner and outer space” (157), but also through the image of the aloe: Pamela Dunbar is correct in her claim, that what magnetizes Linda and makes her have this special likeness for the aloe is the plant’s “resistance to reproduction”, that is once every hundred years (43). It is through the aloe that Linda betrays her desire to escape, along with her above commented on feelings for Stanley, that being not only her love and respect, but also her hatred (Saralyn Daly 68). The only person that provides the children with maternal affection, as also noted earlier, is Linda’s mother, Mrs. Fairfield. The grandmother devotes her life in fostering the children that Linda forsakes. Although this confrontation of life might not be the best solution to Linda’s fears, nevertheless, this is how the situation is handled and the mode by which Linda channels her longings and expresses her will. Thus, it might be that Linda has a secret fervor of “renouncing domesticity” and fleeing from the family environment, yet her powers for proceeding in such an deed are inadequate owing to obstacles, such as “the cruel system which destroys its female participants” (Heather Murray 123). As Murray puts it, “women have nothing to protect them from the dominant male force: there are no firmly-rooted female communities” (32).It is striking that the Burnell family consists of six women, half of them being children and the other half mature -that, of course, being disputable- women, and only one man: nonetheless, no genuine solidarity is established amid them; “rivalry and suspicion are the dominant moods” (132). As a consequence, Linda has no one to hold on to, nowhere to hide and is caught in between her duty-burden as a mother-wife and her passion: to live a liberated, self-governing and self-dependent life, the way she wishes. Motherhood is seen as the only destination for a woman, for the completeness of her maturity and purpose of existence. Ripeness and prime of life is reached only with supplying the world with descendants: that is the ultimate notion; and, unfortunately, it does not abide with Linda’s own notions, desires and philosophy of life. However, the system is not the only one to blame for Linda’s condition; if we scrutinize Linda as a character, we might as well discover that her own passiveness and that only constitutes her chief root of all ills; thinking that something may happen to help her and remaining a statue to Stanley’s sexual demands is not the way out of her miserable life; nothing is achieved with a “faint voice” (23); to be a rebel, you have to raise your voice, project your ideals, your principles; Linda’s “rebellion is immature”(Murray 139): it consists of some vague ideas, but as to what shape it would take, Linda is ignorant (Kaplan 114). She does envision a getaway, except that she hasnot premeditated anything; her chief concern is to break the chains of her imprisonment and sorrow, still she is impotent and utterly apprehensive. As a result, therefore, no final success is achieved in her aims; this means both that she fails to rescue herself from being devoured by family life, and, most important of all, that she submits to Stanley’s standards, giving them value and rating him and the family as “her true suitors”, hence, degrading “her own right to an independent life” as the “false suitor”(Murray 123). She lets everybody else transfer to her the impression that what she requests is wrong and that their happy family is her only proper option with no other alternatives. Linda is beyond no doubt “the epitome of lethargy and lack of resolution” (120). She feels as if she in custody in her own house; she feels captured under her ...