It Matters
The Refrigerator Wife trope has haunted us for centuries. There are plenty of fairy tales where a woman has to die in order for something to happen, and so many books from the 18th and 19th centuries where a woman is just starting to have some agency over her life and has to either commit suicide or die of the consumption (it’s always the fucking consumption, innit?) because we can’t have women making their own decisions about their lives.