"Membranous Croup" is about a couple trying to save one of their children from a sickness plaguing their town. The mother is fanatic and paranoid while the husband is wise but excessively docile. Ironically the child is not really sick but coughs because a pine splinter is lodged in its throat. This happens because in the beginning of the story, the child is chewing on a piece of pine, which the father tells his wife they should take away, but she disagrees. He acquiesces to this, and that night, after the child's first cough, the wife starts thinking their daughter has membranous croup, a fatal, incurable disease, when the true culprit is the pine splinter.
The mother in the story is constantly ordering around her husband and refusing to listen to him. She's acting like a mad woman, obsessing about the heat in the room and how close they should be to the children. The husband, although rational, goes along with everything she says, and at the end of the story, when they find out the cough is from a splinter, he says nothing to her about it. The wife seems disappointed and I kind of got a creepy feeling that she wanted the child to have the sickness and die, that way she would be right. The husband is annoying because he lets his wife push him around, and never seriously voices his opinion. I finished the story with the feeling that Twain was being down on women again, but after some more thought, I saw that he was also criticizing the husband.
There's one point that stands out more than any other, and that is when the wife speaks of judgement, explaining their child is sick because they haven't been living as they "ought to live" (147). I think Twain is trying to show not just the power of paranoia, but where it comes from. The wife fears judgement, of paying for her sins, which leads her deeply into a brief madness, whereas the husband, without a strong fear of judgement, stays level headed.
I come away from this story wondering about the wife. Did she want her child to die? And more importantly, what was she so afraid of being punished for? Perhaps her own dark secrets fueled her paranoia or maybe, were the root of it from the beginning.
