Electric Chair
During the early 1900s, numerous women in the United States were involved in loveless, constraining, dull, and mechanical marriages. During this day and age, women’s lives were set in stone. The average day-to-day life of a wife mostly entailed, cleaning, cooking, performing wifely duties, and tending to the children, home and husband. Wives felt these tasks were their everyday duties because this is what society expected of them. Many women would describe their lives to be miserable in every aspect and would even contemplate the thought of murder. Perhaps the untimely death of a woman’s husband would grant her the sense of entitlement and freedom that she, as well as various other women longed for. In this play, the author describes a story of woman who brutally murders her husband during this time period and was sentenced to death. Not only was her fate decided for her, she was going to die by strong, electric waves pulsating through her body until she takes her last breath, otherwise known as the electric chair. Throughout the Sophie Treadwell’s play, Machinal, she is portraying her work through an angry style of writing towards a predominantly male society, where she is trying to draw parallels between modern pressures and irrational behavior. For some women, the dream of escaping their cookie-cutter lifestyles and routines was worth the possible outcome of them being sentenced to a horrific, painful death by the electric chair.
One key historical aspect that was occurring during this time period was the women’s suffrage movement. Women wanted the same treatment as men in almost every aspect. They wanted rights, the same amount of pay for jobs, as well as the same type of treatment that men obtain. Even if a woman was working in the exact factory as a man and performed the same type of work, most of the time they were compensated much less. Sexual discrimination among women did only occur in one’s home, but also in the work place. Perhaps some women decided to take matters into their own hands when pertaining to their lives and fate. It is understandable as to why women did not want to be involved in a marriage in which they are miserable. In some of their minds, maybe murder was the answer to all of their dreams pertaining to freedom. Or perhaps their own death would be worth finally obtaining their own sense of expressionism and independence in the men-dominated society that they inhabited.
I chose the electric chair for my Omeka project for our class this term. This photograph was taken in 1908, right around the time period of where we are currently learning. I chose the electric chair because it a large type of literary machine that we have yet to learn about. I had a strong feeling that most of the other students in the class were going to choose photographs that had to do with machines from the previous novels we had read, but especially with meat packing machines from “The Jungle.” I decided to do something different, moreover because we have not read the story that goes along with the electric chair; therefore, I am extremely anxious to read how this story plays out for the reader.
I also chose the electric chair for my project because this type of machine has a great deal of political controversy tied with it as well. The electric chair has always been deemed as unethical and for decades has caused a massive political uproar. I currently do not know exactly where I stand when pertaining to the use of extermination through the electric chair so my hopes are that for this project, I will be able to come to firm stance towards one way or the other. I am also intrigued with what people thought about its use during the early 1900s. Were people more so for the use of electricity to cause death or were they swaying in the other direction because of how often it was used? I have read that criminals who were faced with the electric chair believed that it caused horrendous amounts of pain and suffering before death. Do criminals deserve to die peacefully through injection or do they deserve to feel the most intensive pain before they die? The electric chair is no longer used for the death penalty and I am interested to see if it will ever be brought back.