At once too obvious to have to point out and too important to overlook is the notion that had Walter Mitty been a capable man and fulfilled husband, he would not have dreamed such interesting dreams; and therefore there would have been no story at all. The "Secret Life" referred to in the title and the constant tension between that colorfully, brilliantly narrated life and the drab Connecticut background with the drab, nagging wife impress upon the reader a powerful message about the very act of reading literature in modern society. Though they may not make it an explicit theme as does Thurber's story, even the most stylized modern fictions have a substantial connection with a social reality in which angst, anomie, and all-round breakdown of both practical and societal stability is commonplace and essential.
There are some elements of the story that point directly to modern society and its problems, such as the felt vacuity of the standards Mrs. Mitty tries to impose on her husband and the seeming meaninglessness of all the products Walter has to go shopping for throughout the story; but it is more Walter's general sense of being trapped, of having no recourse for (especially masculine) self-realization other than pure fantasy—fantasy which only throws his impotence into greater relief. Without reading too far, we might take note of the preponderance of specifically male-gendered violence in Walter's fantasies as something that, in a story written in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, may point to a similar sensibility to that of the fascist ideas that soon spread across Europe. This not to say that we are reading the secret life of fascist; but it is important to keep in mind that at this point in history, an indulgence in what is frankly the pure stylization of violence and masculine chauvinism provided both the impotent, despairing individual and fractured societies with a much-desired sense of completeness.
Thus, in an ironic turn, we might argue that Walter Mitty's "Secret Life" is really his only life; what we might call his "real life" is no life at all, is from his point of view a bore and torment, and from the view of the narrative, only a trove of material for his more inspired fantasies.
