Marriage and Gender Inequality Theme Analysis

“The Other Two” features a middle-aged couple, Mr. Waythorn and Mrs. Alice Waythorn, recently returned from their unexpectedly short honeymoon. Though at first the Waythorns appear to be a happy couple, Wharton is quick to establish tensions between the pair, many of which exist as a result of gender-based inequalities. Most immediately, there is the reason for their return—Alice’s daughter, Lily, has fallen ill. Unlike Mr. Waythorn, the marriage is not Alice’s first: she has been married twice before, first to Mr. Haskett, and later to Mr. Varick. Their immensely different romantic pasts prove to be just the beginning of the imbalance that exists between Mr. and Mrs. Waythorn as a couple. As the reader will realize by the story’s end, the Waythorn marriage is anything but loving and equal. Through the Waythorns’ rocky relationship, Wharton makes a broader statement about gender inequality and married couples, suggesting that marriage is an institution that forces women into submission. Within the confines of a marriage, women are all too often treated as objects that men own—not full people in their own right.

Throughout the story, Waythorn is horrified at the thought of Alice possessing even the smallest amount of agency. This becomes particularly apparent in Waythorn’s eventual sympathy for Alice’s first husband, Mr. Haskett. Waythorn comes to feel pity for Haskett because he believes that Haskett has been somehow wronged by Alice’s conniving opportunism (divorcing him for a wealthier man). Waythorn realizes that “all he had learned [of Haskett] was favourable.” Waythorn feels it is honorable for Haskett to do things for his daughter, Lily: upending his life, moving to a new city to be near her, and visiting her regularly and express concern for her wellbeing. And yet, Waythorn does not extend the same sympathies to Alice. He never considers that his wife’s strategy of “moving up” might be motivated by the promise of a better life for her daughter. In Waythorn’s eyes, Haskett is honest and motivated, while Alice is conniving and blindly opportunistic. As a man, Haskett’s motivations are virtuous. As a woman, Alice’s are viewed in a harsher light. When Waythorn regretfully admits that he “had been allowed to infer that Alice’s first husband was a brute,” he reveals that he would rather that Alice had been abused or belittled by her first husband, because this would deny her relative agency in the matter. What’s more, it would render her a helpless victim—a damsel in distress in need of saving. Where Alice assumes the role of victim, Waythorn may render himself the hero. Ultimately, Waythorn would prefer to accept that his wife had been harmed or wronged by a man than that she could have had the intellectual or emotional capacity to make decisions based on wants and desires rather than by needs, suggesting that their marriage is based on an imbalanced power dynamic rather than genuine love and care.

Another example of gender inequality is Waythorn’s tendency to expresses the jealousy he feels over Alice in monetary terms. The economic aspect of Waythorn’s jealousy creates an imbalance in his marriage, transforming Alice from an equal companion to an object to be owned and coveted. Sick with jealousy over the influence the ex-husbands seem to have had on Alice’s present personality, Waythorn curses the naiveté with which he once supposed “that a woman can shed her past like a man.” When Waythorn married Alice, he believed that he could get over the fact that he wasn’t the first to do so—that he could accept that there were other men who had loved her before he’d even had the chance to know her. Wharton draws out the moment Waythorn understands the consequences of his naïve assumption with an evocative rendering of Waythorn as “a member of a syndicate” in which “he held so many shares in his wife’s personality and his predecessors were his partners in the business.” In this comparison, Waythorn configures himself and Alice’s ex-husbands to be ex-owners of Alice, rather than ex-lovers. Waythorn’s refiguring of the husbands as owners and Alice as their property effectively rips Alice of her subjecthood. When Waythorn additionally wonders “if it were not better to own a third of a wife who knew how to make a man happy than a whole one who lacked opportunity to acquire the art,” Waythorn again conceives of his relationship with Alice as a type of ownership. In this passage, he divides her into three pieces, like shares of property to be owned, lost, and gained by each husband. Lastly, the reader may refer to a passage early in the text where Waythorn describes the beginnings of their courtship. Knowing Alice’s history of divorce and remarriage, many people raised their eyebrows at Waythorn’s decision to marry her. Waythorn states that “In the Wall Street phrase, he had ‘discounted’ them.” Again, Waythorn uses economic or business terminology to talk about his romance and relationship with Alice, situating her as more of an asset to be attained than a lover to be romanced.

Despite being perceived as property by her husband, however, Alice is held to a higher standard in maintaining emotional peace and tranquility in their marriage. In the beginning of the story, when Alice first informs her husband that Haskett will visit their home the next day, Waythorn responds coldly. He feels ill at the thought of another man stepping foot in his private home. Knowing that Haskett is legally permitted to see his daughter, however, he ultimately accepts this unpleasant development. In an effort to maintain some amount of control, he orders Alice to move on from brooding over this unpleasant matter. Immediately, Waythorn observes that “her own [eyes] were quite clear and untroubled: he saw that she had obeyed his injection and forgotten.” Alice’s discomfort (in this instance, she is upset about having to see Mr. Haskett) is always less important than her husband’s. Waythorn’s discomfort must always be absolved, often at the expense of Alice’s. Later on in the text, Waythorn discovers that Alice has lied to him about seeing Haskett on his first visit with Lily. Even though she originally insisted that she’d neither seen nor spoke to the man, Haskett reveals the two had a rather unpleasant and unproductive disagreement that day. Alice’s lie angers her husband, but the fact that Alice didn’t somehow “divine” that meeting with Haskett would upset her husband in the first place “was almost as disagreeable to the latter as the discovery that she had lied to him.” In Waythorn’s mind, Alice must be able to sense what he wants before he says it. In contrast, Waythorn extends no effort to separate Alice’s inner life from her outer actions. Waythorn’s relationship to Alice’s calm, polite disposition illustrates an additional asymmetry in their relationship. Reflecting on his wife’s calm demeanor, Waythorn notes that “her composure was restful to him; it acted as a ballast to his somewhat unstable sensibilities.” Mr. Waythorn takes it for granted that Alice is naturally, or even accidentally calm. He fails to see her calmness as a conscious action she performs in order to make him feel comfortable. Again, this demonstrates the inequality of their relationship, in this instance as it regards the emotional accountability of either spouse.

The Waythorns’ absorption of Alice’s two ex-husbands into their social life might incite rising spousal tensions, but Wharton ultimately reveals the true source of their marital discontent to be an underlying framework of gender inequalities and asymmetries—a critique that pertains not only to “The Other Two,” but to the larger issue of gender inequality in the early 1900s when the story was written.