Despite focusing on the seemingly small problems of middle class white women, the legacy of the book. Her work propelled the stagnant women’s rights movement into its second wave and helped women reclaim some equality. Karnac possesses a “magnetic power” over Sybil. In the Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan put a spotlight on the hidden, yet immense problems women faced during the 1950’s. She finds a note warning her, “If you are not already mad, you will be, I suspect you were sent here to be made so for the air is poison, the solitude fatal, and Karnac remorseless in his mania for prying into the mysteries of the human mind.” Like Freud, Dr. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. Itwas a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle ofthe twentieth century in the United States. Published a five years before Little Women, “A Whisper in in the Dark” sees an orphan named Sybil drugged and trapped inside a mansion madhouse ruled by the powerful Dr. BettyFriedan Mystique The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. This place grimly represented the world, for “Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?” Half a century later, Louisa May Alcott thrust a woman into an asylum thanks to an evil uncle in a bid to inherit her fortune. In her posthumously published Maria, or, the Wrongs of Woman, for instance, pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft has her protagonist locked in an asylum by her controlling husband. The pleasant, homelike exterior masking a prison for mental torment, controlled by a powerful patriarch, rings familiar to students of feminist literature.
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