An Analysis of Maupassant’s An Adventure in Paris Essay Example

political, legal, and social discourses proliferated the claim that men and women were distinctly different.

While this in itself is not a negative assertion, when applied as the measure of all social interactions consequences were severe for women. They were just limited within the bounds of home and market. Her tasks mainly consist of taking care of household chores, her children and her husband.

Men were expected to rule over the public sphere consisting of the non-familial outside world, work time, impersonal relationships, distance, illegitimate sexuality, rationality and efficiency, immorality, artificial life and insincerity, and division and dissonance. Women were thought to possess opposing characteristics marked by home and family, personal relationships, proximity, love and legitimate sexuality, emotion and irrationality, morality, natural life and sincerity, and warmth and harmony.

Clearly, the lawyer’s wife wanted to explore more about what she had read in magazines and journey Paris. Obviously, she could not simply leave her family and when she got the chance, she was like a dove that was set free in a cage.

It is also quite obvious message that exemplifies the “great divide” of man/woman roles in French society during those times. The narrator himself warned at the very start of this short story about how a woman’s curiosity led to her guilt:

When once a woman's eager curiosity is aroused, she will be guilty of any folly, commit any imprudence, venture upon anything, and recoil from nothing. I am speaking of women who are really women, who are endowed with that triple-bottomed disposition, which appears to be reasonable and cold on the surface, but whose three secret compartments

are filled (Maupassant, ??).

Agreeably, Maupassant’s An Adventure in Paris offers more to its readers than an entertaining read about a female character who commits adultery. In fact, this story can be classified as more on the masculine narrator’s perception of the protagonist and her embodiment of curious women than on the sexual act itself.

It is observable that  the narrator’s authoritative male voice shadows the overarching ideology concerning female sexuality in nineteenth-century France: curious women are dangerous and they should be controlled.