There is a strong binary opposition of the masculine large and feminine small threading throughout the story, demonstrated in this scene, by Herr Brechenmacher not having enough room to dress in the kitchen with his wife, where previously she had been working in there with her daughter and no sense of it being too small.
Following on from this, we then see Frau Brechenmacher banished to the dark, while the husband basks in the warm and light of the kitchen to get dressed, a visual indication of their relative importance, echoing sun/moon imagery. This importance is repeated as we see Frau Brechenmacher hurry along after her husband in the snow, almost as his retinue, while he blazes along, keeping his feet nice and dry.
Until this point, the reader is offered a subjective and relatively narrow view of one relationship. However, the story widens to bring in several other relationships, which the reader is invited to judge in the light of the first scene. When Frau Brechenmacher and her husband arrive at the wedding, she notices that the dominant/submissive male and female roles not only occur in her household, but to those around her in her society. A chauvinistic landlord bullies his female staff, which causes her husband to repeat his earlier behaviour by jostling his wife and not apologising; the bride's mother is jeered at by her husband for not being cheerful and the bride is teased by both her husband and Herr Brechenmacher as she is reduced to a child by them playing tricks on her and dangling trinkets in front of her face.
As the wedding scene unfolds, the theme of oppression is quite blatant, particularly with the image of the bride: "she in a white dress trimmed with stripes and bows of coloured ribbon, giving her the appearance of an iced cake all ready to be cut and served in neat little pieces to the bridegroom beside her." The implication is that marriage is a ritual death for women, and likens the "eating of the bride" to the consummation of marriage in which man is the devourer and consumer (Moran 118).
