_“A_Gentle_Creature_“

“A Gentle Creature“ On one level, “A Gentle Creature” is a love story. However, instead of fulfilling romantic ideals, “A Gentle Creature” portrays a battleground. Instead of a tale of mutual happiness through mutual submission, it tells of a power struggle between the narrator and his wife. Despite the fact that the husband possesses all of the story’s narrative time, it is his wife who, through her death, eventually triumphs. The entire tale is the futile attempt of the narrator to regain the power he loses when his wife commits suicide. There are many examples of how the narrator attempts to control his wife—not only throughout her lifetime, but from beyond the grave. For example, the text never provides the reader with a name for the narrator’s wife. Thus, she exists in the text only through her relationship to the narrator. On that basic level, she is denied her own individuality. Although the narrator himself also goes nameless, this namelessness does not imply the same lack of control. Because the husband possesses all of the narrative force within the text, his refusal to provide a name is irrelevant to the power narrator, power, wife, control, wife’s, gentle, death, creature, own, over, one, narrator’s, narrative, life, worship, through, tale, object, love, husband, however, attempt, yet, time, text, submission, struggle, same, role, final, fact, corpse, beyond, because, although