Winifred:An Excessively Rational Woman in the Trap---an Interpretation of the wife in The Door of the Trap from the Perspective of Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatus

摘要

Anderson' s works pose a great challenge to critics due to his revolt against the literary tradition and the difficulty of the classification of his works. His language is tainted with obscurity and vagueness. “The Door of the Trap,” can be ostensibly interpreted as a story of unfulfilled love in an unsatisfactory marriage. Hugh Walker is a math teacher at a small college in Union Valley, Illinois. Married with three children, he often finds himself walking to “cure the restlessness in himself.” One source of his restlessness is his attraction to Mary Cochran. Freed by the death of her father in “Unlighted Lamps,” Mary has gone to college and taken up residence in the Walker house. It is a house of cards ready to collapse. Hugh sees himself as a house whose “shutters are loose.” When he kisses Mary and then asks her to leave the house, she does so “weak with fright” Hugh remains, trapped in what he sees as the prison of his marriage and the reality of his life. The author has noticed that Anderson himself has married three times. And in his letter to Eleanor he has mentioned the importance of a woman in a married life. Given the description of the wife in the door of the trap is not direct and is lacking in length, the author of this paper attempts to interpret the image of the wife by means of Althusser's theory of marriage as an ideological state apparatus. The paper comes to a conclusion: The structure of marriage, with its expectations of obligatory bond between the wife and husband without preconditions, belongs to the apparatus of ideological state control. It is Winifred 'excessive rationality that leads her to regard marriage as a “contract”which is just the functioning principle of marriage ideological state apparatus rather than realize the importance of“intimacy”which Anderson has attached great importance to in married life.