“Fatal”
Marriage
In the work “To the Ladies” by Lady Mary Chudleigh
a strong message is sent out to women. “There is no coherent subject position
available for a woman in a society where her identity, her status, her very
name, are dependent on the man she is attached to by birth or marriage” (85).
During the seventeenth century men held authority over the house like today,
but women had nearly no rights. In this literary work a wife is compared to a
slave, for the poet to use such a term only shows how vulgarly women were being
treated. Her words were picked out consciously and wisely to explain to her
fellow women the inequality towards them. Chudleigh
used literary devices to further her masterpiece, using the text as a personal
code to be interpreted.
