the problematics of motherhood in twentieth century women's fiction

115
adaptability, but realizes that these are not virtues but a
form of dementia.
3.4.5.1. Away from home, Kate persistently probes Into her
predicament and the femlnine mystique whlch had enveloped
her all these years
It is only through self-analysls and
self-introspection, and a rummaging through her past life
that Kate comes to understand what she had actually been
reduced to all the years of her life.
All durlng the
summer, the "shortened, heightened, concentrated time"
(SBD
9), Kate delves lnto the reasons why she had been
leadlng an Inauthentic existence, why she had been taklng
the same old dresses off the rack
It is only after she
shrugs off her stereotyped attlre, after twenty-flve years
of marriage, that she really thlnks for herself and reallzes
that all those years had seemed a betrayal of what she
really was
All along ',she had been set llke a machire by
twenty-odd years of belng a wife and mother" ISBD . 171
Looking back from the ccndltlon of belng an almost mrcdle-
aged wlfe and mother to her condition as a glrl when she
llved wlth Michael, lt seemed to her that she had accp~lred
not vlrtues but a form of demenrla whlch turned her lnto an
"obsessed manlac" (SBD . 91)
By her husband and children,
she was treated as "something to be put up with":
Mother was an uncertain quantity She was like an
old nurse who had given her years to her famlly
and must now be put up with (SBD : 91).