“The Problem That Has No Name”: Three Short Stories by Truman Capote

• Main Authors: Mei-Hui Chiang, 江美慧
• Other Authors: Mei-Hwa Sung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/36738650632360969010

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系碩士班 === 96 === After the Second World War, an ideal image of woman as a “happy housewife” was widely emphasized. In TV dramas or the stories in women’s magazines, women were inculcated to pursue a feminine fulfillment in marriage rather than to pursue higher education, independence or equality. Betty Friedan observes, in her The Feminine Mystique, that many housewives, influenced by the feminine mystique, suffered from an unnamable discontentedness and identity crisis. She names this unnamable distress as “the problem that has no name.” The mystique lasted for decades. Housewives began to fill up psychiatrists’ offices. Emotional breakdown and suicide were found among these women. About twenty years before Friedan published her book; there was already someone who noted the same problem she was concerned about: Truman Capote. The writer, furthermore, noted that housewives were not the only victims of this false belief system. In a society where “the housewife was the only dream” for a woman, those who failed to settle down in marriage faced a more difficult situation. They became misfits to society and their bitterness was even more unnamable. Capote’s “Miriam” (1945), “Master Misery” (1949) and “Among the Paths to Eden” (1960) tell three different stories about how social confinement of women and the prevalent feminine mystique ideology challenge the three heroines’ lives. This thesis expands Friedan’s term, “the problem that has no name,” to describe and point out the unnamable distaff distress of the three heroines when confronting the overwhelming feminine mystique. This thesis also explores a critique of patriarchy that Capote implies in these three short stories.