Edwardian Age

 The term “Edwardian Age” refers to years during which Edward VII reigned. Though Edward was king from 1900 to 1910, the era named after him is often extended to the start of World War I in 1914. The Edwardian period marked the very different mood that prevailed in England and in America in the first decade of the twentieth century. In 1901, Edward ascended the throne upon the death of his mother, Victoria, who had been queen since 1837. In the early 2000s, many people probably assume that the Victorian period was one of prudishness and repressed sexuality. To whatever extent that description is accurate, Victoria’s son, Edward was quite a contrast. He was self-indulgent and licentious. His own behavior matched a developing English taste for permissiveness, intellectual inquiry, and social progressiveness.

 Margaret fights Victorian assumptions. She tries to liberalize nineteenth-century standards for women, remnants of the old oppressive social order. Having grown up in a household that encouraged her to challenge conventional beliefs, she is prepared for the fight, but she leaves England disappointed in Englishmen who are resistant to female suffrage. In the end, though, the man who does listen to her and respect her individuality is an Englishman.

 Women’s Rights

 Margaret’s obsession is female suffrage, a goal shared by many women and men at the start of the twentieth century. She is so involved in the National American Women Suffrage Association that she attends an international convention supporting the cause held in England. Her concern for social justice shapes her world view: she is suspicious of men, expecting the worst of them. When she meets the Englishman on the deck of the  Titanic , she thinks that he “seemed stupid at first, in a typical way”: she expects him to dismiss her intuition about their present situation and is instead surprised to find that he takes her seriously. His acceptance, coming after years of struggling with men’s patronizing attitudes, is such a surprise that it frightens and angers her, forcing her to walk away. At the end of their brief encounter, she finds that, even though she feels the right to, she cannot bring herself to reach out and touch him. At the last minute, faced with almost certain death, she is still bound by the traditional gender roles that she has spent her adult life struggling against.

 Flesh versus Spirit

 Though Margaret, the protagonist of this story, is strong spirited, she is unable to translate that strength into a sense of truly feeling at one with her own flesh. When she talks about going to Venice to be alone after facing crowds of hostile men at the rally in London, she describes her self-conscious inability to bathe or even to look at her own body naked. As she puts it, “For all my ideas I was not comfortable in this woman’s body.” Margaret describes being told of her father’s death and realizing that he “had left his body.” She wonders, when faced with death at the sinking of Titanic , whether her father found his body as useless as she found hers. In the end, though, she comes to an understanding that unites her body and her spirit. In the future, far removed from the events of April 1912, she thinks about the Englishman with whom she shared a spiritual bond on that night. At the time, she was too self-conscious to touch him, as she wanted: looking back now at what has been important in her life, she is able to free herself of her clothes, as she was not able to before. Sliding naked into the cold water in the bathtub makes her acutely aware of her body, and she imagines that she and this man, with whom she connected in life can be together again, spiritually, this time in death.

 Love

 This is a story about a woman who has worked so diligently to avoid being victimized by traditional gender roles that she suppresses the impulse to love when it occurs. The affection that Margaret shows for her father is deep, as is seen clearly in the scene where she sits by his bedside the night of his death and weeps while she holds his hand. Her love for the Englishman whom she meets on shipboard, however, is much less certain. Throughout their brief encounter, Margaret holds this man at length. She never even learns his name. She expects a condescending attitude from him, and she is surprised to see his genuine interest in her, that he takes her seriously. Her suspicion is so strong that it keeps her from putting a hand up to his face as they are about to separate: the love impulse within her tells her to reach out to him, but Margaret has been conditioned to check herself. It is only after she survives the ordeal and is magically transported decades into the future that she takes the time to consider the potential in that relationship. Then she realizes that it was in fact love, and she wants to rejoin him in spirit.

Source:

Ira Mark Milne – Short Stories for Students – Presenting Analysis, Context & Criticism on Commonly Studied Short Stories, vol. 22, Robert Olen Butler, Published by Gale Group, 2010