The male and female border

Earlier this semester we discussed some of Mary Austin's short stories and a few other works that dealt with the idea of the woman in the wild as apposed to civilization. In Austin’s “The Bitterness of Women” both the woman and the man are portrayed as sad characters; sad in the sense that neither of them needed one another, but felt that it was as good as it was going to get for both of them. The woman may have thought she loved him, but she is in a southwestern town where the options for women are not the same. In the same way the man would not have gone back to her had he not been mauled by a bear and become disfigured. It is amazing that SHE allowed him to walk back into her live after he dumped her to the curb. Austin was trying to convey the complex relationships between men and woman and the reality of men’s nature. The main character was not the most attractive girl in the town and maybe not the brightest, but she devoted herself to him after his accident without a single complaint, even finding some joy in playing the role of his caregiver, yet he, even in his state of deformity did not feel anything for her. He could only think about the many women that he would not be able to have a good time with. The bitterness of women in this story is that men can’t see past the physical in order to see women for who they truly are, therefore leading to the man’s own unhappiness.