The universe of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 quietly exposes some of the harmful and often untalked about aspects of ‘50s era housewives. At the time of writing, the early 1950s, the housewife was one of the only occupations for women. Mrs. Montag reflects this in the Fahrenheit universe as a stay at home wife to Guy Montag. However, the novel makes it clear that she doesn’t live a utopian life by displaying the mental illness and drug misuse as a result of her suppressive and mentally strenuous role.
The fifties housewife herself was the presented role for women of the day. Post WWII, women were no longer doing all the men’s jobs while they were away fighting. Instead, she was restricted to oversee all of the domestic household issues and …show more content…
Montag comments to her, “[M]y wife thirty and yet you seem so much older at times.” (21). Her youth lends her character to be a naively wise as she has not yet been forced into the adulthood woman role. Her perspective shows that there is something other than that housewife life she would grow into. Clarisse is content and personally happy given the way that she conducts herself and enjoys life outside of the fast and intense culture of media and violence. Clarisse even asks Montag if he’s happy, which seems to imply that she’s already reached happiness with herself. Given Clarisse the exact converse of Mildred and personally fulfilled, it suggests that the role Mildred fills as a media consumed housewife is flawed by restraining a person to the and making …show more content…
She uses sleeping pills as an alternative to the tranquilizers of the real life housewife—instead of getting through the day with a chemical happiness, she intends for a more fatal eternal sleep. Later she even denies knowingly killing herself, speaking with Montag the morning after,
“‘You took all the pills in your bottle last night.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” she said, surprised.
“The bottle was empty.”
“I wouldn’t do a thing like that, Why would I do a thing like that?” she said
[. . .] “[W]hat would I want to go and do a silly thing like that for?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
She was quite obviously waiting for him to go. “I didn’t do that,” she said. “Never in a billion years.’” (17)
Mildred prefers not to talk about the important issue of her mental health, as shown in the dismissive manner she shoots down the topic with. Additionally, when the machine operators come to clean out Mildred earlier, in response to why they aren’t a doctor they say, “‘We get these cases nine or ten a night.’” (13) Their statement proves that suicide attempts are so common they’ve become impersonal and mechanical to fix. The fact that Montag even has to ask also proves that apparently it is not common knowledge that there’s something collectively wrong with their society—people are attempting to kill themselves more frequently than anyone