- description
- # Introduction of the Wife's Character
## Overview
This segment, titled "Introduction of the Wife's Character," is a textual component extracted from the short story "[I and My Chimney](arke:01KG8AJ72QDX8N8STJ3550X2NW)." It spans lines 382 to 416 of the source text and focuses on the narrator's detailed description of his wife's personality, physical attributes, and philosophical outlook.
## Context
The segment is part of the larger short story "[I and My Chimney](arke:01KG8AJ72QDX8N8STJ3550X2NW)," which is itself contained within the "[Melville Complete Works](arke:01KG89HMDZKNY753EZE1CJ8HZW)" collection. The text was extracted from the file "[i_and_my_chimney.txt](arke:01KG89J1H4TA19251AXAPE3ZWC)" on January 30, 2026. This segment follows "[Wife's Campaign to Alter the Chimney](arke:01KG8AJKWE68K12RK4CE0X4TZD)," which describes the wife's attempts to modify their home, and precedes "[Contrast Between Narrator and Wife](arke:01KG8AJKWR8YQ4AEE6FF9D1M7Y)," which further elaborates on the differences between the couple.
## Contents
The segment provides a vivid character sketch of the narrator's wife. He describes her as nearly as old as himself but possessing a youthful spirit, free from physical ailments despite coming from a "rheumatic family." The narrator highlights her acute senses of hearing and sight, and her alert faculties. He characterizes her as an "enterprising wife" and a "natural projector" whose maxim is "Whatever is, is wrong; and what is more, must be altered; and what is still more, must be altered right away." This contrasts sharply with the narrator's own "dozy old dreamer" nature. The segment also notes her seemingly un-Christian disbelief in old age and death, suggesting an inexhaustible vitality.
- description_generated_at
- 2026-01-30T20:47:59.636Z
- description_model
- gemini-2.5-flash-lite
- description_title
- Introduction of the Wife's Character
- end_line
- 416
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:47:36.358Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 382
- text
- And here, respectfully craving her permission, I must say a few words
about this enterprising wife of mine. Though in years nearly old as
myself, in spirit she is young as my little sorrel mare, Trigger, that
threw me last fall. What is extraordinary, though she comes of a
rheumatic family, she is straight as a pine, never has any aches; while
for me with the sciatica, I am sometimes as crippled up as any old
apple-tree. But she has not so much as a toothache. As for her
hearing—let me enter the house in my dusty boots, and she away up in
the attic. And for her sight—Biddy, the housemaid, tells other people’s
housemaids, that her mistress will spy a spot on the dresser straight
through the pewter platter, put up on purpose to hide it. Her faculties
are alert as her limbs and her senses. No danger of my spouse dying of
torpor. The longest night in the year I’ve known her lie awake,
planning her campaign for the morrow. She is a natural projector. The
maxim, “Whatever is, is right,” is not hers. Her maxim is, Whatever is,
is wrong; and what is more, must be altered; and what is still more,
must be altered right away. Dreadful maxim for the wife of a dozy old
dreamer like me, who dote on seventh days as days of rest, and out of a
sabbatical horror of industry, will, on a week day, go out of my road a
quarter of a mile, to avoid the sight of a man at work.
That matches are made in heaven, may be, but my wife would have been
just the wife for Peter the Great, or Peter the Piper. How she would
have set in order that huge littered empire of the one, and with
indefatigable painstaking picked the peck of pickled peppers for the
other.
But the most wonderful thing is, my wife never thinks of her end. Her
youthful incredulity, as to the plain theory, and still plainer fact of
death, hardly seems Christian. Advanced in years, as she knows she must
be, my wife seems to think that she is to teem on, and be inexhaustible
forever. She doesn’t believe in old age. At that strange promise in the
plain of Mamre, my old wife, unlike old Abraham’s, would not have
jeeringly laughed within herself.
- title
- Introduction of the Wife's Character