Feminist Literary And Cultural Theory By Donald Hall

Commonly explored throughout her works, the idea of marriage inhibiting a woman’s freedom is the driving force behind Kate Chopin’s contextual objections to propriety. In particular, The Awakening and “The Story of an Hour” explore the lives of women seeking marital liberation and individuality. Mrs. Chopin, who was raised in a matriarchal household, expresses her opposition to the nineteenth century patriarchal society while using her personal experiences to exemplify her feminist views.

Kate Chopin’s aspiration to deliver The Awakening was to convey to the early 20th century public her position of women’s roles, rights, and independence in a time of strict gender roles. Chopin conveys to readers the oppression of women during her time. Edna Pontellier is Chopin’s protagonist in the novel, and she finds herself unhappy and contempt of her role as a republican mother, which characterizes the idea of women’s work, and Edna identifies indirectly with the women at the Seneca Falls convention. Throughout the book Edna’s husband, Leónce Pontellier, continually scolds her for not being an attentive and loving mother and Edna compares herself with Madame Ratignolle, who is the epitome of motherhood

Kate Chopin is known for being criticized for empowering the subject of female sexuality and independence. In Chopin’s short story, “The Story of an Hour”, it is placed in a time where men were known as being the head of the household while women were only in charge of raising the children and caring for the home. In the 1890s, women didn’t have so much power to themselves compared to today’s society where female empowerment is frequently encouraged. Chopin’s story narrates a sequence of Mrs. Mallard’s emotions that goes within the motion of the story. As she overcomes the sudden death of her husband, her emotion of grief soon turns into the sudden feeling of freedom, later on emerging into a strong independent woman.

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening explores the effects societal conventions had on women by narrating a tale of how a woman’s pursuit of independence, her sexual identity, and self-expression leads to her solitude and eventual death. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women weren’t expected to be anything else besides a pious wife and mother. They endured male dominance, a lack of independence, and the nonexistence of their sexual freedom. Due to this sad reality, Chopin decided to write a book that confronted these ideas by portraying an unromantic marriage with a woman who challenges the expectations of females during that time. During the beginning of the novel, Edna lived passively within the cult of domesticity. She did what she was expected to do; however, the more she questioned her life, the more she realized her own desires and identity. “At a very

Over the course of time the male species has always been the gender to attain the more favorable conditions. Numerous cultures heed to the belief that the man is the provider and head of his family. This machismo nature can condition the mind to believe that a man should feel superior to a woman. The continuous cycle of male superiority flows down from father to son subconsciously. Do to this unceasing sequence of behavior women fall subject to repression and control at the hands of mentally undeveloped men. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, illustrated this particular topic in a way that not only appealed to the readers’ sense of pathos but, the readers’ likeliness to be able to relate to the aforementioned as well. Chopin stylistically renders the struggle of the protagonist Edna Pontellier, a strong willed woman who finds herself imprisoned to the concept of trans-temporal existence, as she seeks refuge to her true being, Edna experiments relationships with multiple men that unintentionally repress her existence. Between Leonce Pontellier, Robert Lebrun, Alcee Arobin and The Colonel effect of Edna’s life they catalyze her awakening and ultimately lead her suicide.

Have you ever wondered what the lifestyles of Nineteenth Century women were like? Were they independent, career women or were they typical housewives that cooked, clean, watched the children, and catered to their husbands. Did the women of this era express themselves freely or did they just do what society expected of them? Kate Chopin was a female author who wrote several stories and two novels about women. One of her renowned works of art is The Awakening. This novel created great controversy and received negative criticism from literary critics due to Chopin's portrayal of women by Edna throughout the book.

In The Awakening, Kate Chopin creates a protagonist that clearly demonstrates a feminist. The protagonist, Edna Pontellier seeks more from life than what she is living and starts to refuse the standards of the society she lives in. Edna has many moments of awakening resulting in creating a new person for herself. She starts to see the life of freedom and individuality she wants to live. The Awakening encourages feminism as a way for women to obtain freedom and choose individuality over conformity. Chopin creates a feminist story that shows a transformation from an obedient “mother-woman” to a woman who is willing to sacrifice her old life to become independent and make an identity for herself.

Social expectations play a major role in one’s society and not always in a positive manner. Throughout history, there have been many pieces that demonstrate this idea and each individual piece has contributed to a pathway that is gradually improving our society’s standards. One novel that clearly demonstrates the idea of women, in particular, being bound by social expectations, is The Awakening by Kate Chopin. The restrictions and expectations imposed on Edna Pontellier in this novel are based purely on her gender. Edna consistently runs counter to her society’s assumptions of womanhood.

In 1899, Kate Chopin had published The Awakening, an American literature classic. Set in Victorian Louisiana, Chopin presented a world where woman are often given a limited amount of options in the many difficult choices we face today in life and bounded to a certain status. Stephen Greenblatt proclaims that the “beliefs and practices that form a given culture function as a pervasive technology of control, a set of limits… to which individuals must conform” as well as that “literature… has been one of the great institutions for the enforcement of culture through praise and blame.” The Awakening is the first of its time to introduce the idea that women should not follow the cultural boundaries set for them and to “batter against those boundaries” instead. However, the novel has also managed to be an “enforcement of cultural boundaries” by showing the consequence of when they are challenge. Readers of its time would find The Awakening as a breakthrough of the cultural constraints women faced in 19th century Louisiana whereas modern readers would be shocked by how enforced these seemingly oppressive boundaries are. The Awakening shows these two concepts mostly through its protagonist, Edna Pontellier, who finds herself constrained by the stereotypes and roles women are given in society and chooses to disagree with them in implicit and explicit ways stated below.

Feminism is a movement towards equal society for both genders, male and female, without discrimination. We should be able to live our lives without having the fear of being judged and meeting the criteria assigned to each gender roles. In most feminist narratives, the protagonists of the text are led by a woman who seeks deliverance from the patriarchal oppression. The outcome of these problems is the blatant actions of women to disenthrall from the oppressive. Kate Chopin the author of the short story “The Story of an Hour” and the book The Awakening, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman of “The Yellow Wallpaper”, portray the women’s resistance and the subverted patriarchal oppression they experienced by women accepting the forced assigned roles

Throughout history the female gender has been considered the lesser sex, where they had little to no power over anything. Eventually they got tired of their mistreatment and those who wanted it to end became known as feminist. They hold the idea that both men and women should be treated as equals. Many feminist were authors who contained the feminist literary theory within their works. The theory mainly focuses on critiquing how women must comply with gender roles and how they have been denied their rights by men. The feminist literary theory has many forms, one of them would be cultural feminism, which focuses on the stereotypical women who is only meant to look pretty and take care of minor jobs such as cooking, cleaning, and watching the children. The feminist literary appears in the short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which is about an unnamed female narrator who suffers from a nervous condition during the late 1800s, and is locked within her bedroom. The feminist Kate Chopin has written many works containing the feminist literary theory, such as her short story “The Story of an Hour” which revolves around Mrs. Mallard, who has lost her husband in a train accident, so she starts to shed tears of sorrow, however her tears of sorrow transform into tears of joy. One of Chopin 's novel, The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier a woman who starts to realize the truth of society. Feminist literary theory can be viewed in many different

In "The Awakening" Kate Chopin's narrative is a critique of the ancient confines of gender roles and the sexism that comes with this cultural norm, ultimately conveying that the freedom of a woman's soul is not something that her society is ready for. The one independent-minded woman in the novel cannot live with herself because of the confines that society has trapped her in. Chopin utilizes juxtapositions between Adele and Edna, symbolic application of the sea, and diction indicative of sexism in 'The Awakening' to create this innovative critique.

During the feminist movement many female authors began to write novels about female emancipation. In these novels, the protagonist experiences enlightenment where she discovers that she is living an incomplete life that society has oppressed her into. Before the movement, society forced women into roles that were inferior to men and they were thought of as men’s property. Harold bloom states, “The direction of The Awakening follows what is becoming a pattern in literature by and about women…toward greater self-knowledge that leads in turn to a revelation of the disparity between that self-knowledge and nature of the world” (Bloom, Kate Chopin 43). Moreover, Chopin viewed women’s independence as a personal challenge more than a social struggle, which contradicts her literary works. According to Harold Bloom, “Chopin’s novel was not intended to make a broad social statement but rather that it indicates that Chopin viewed women’s independence as a personal matter”(Bloom, Bloom’s Notes 58). In the past, the novel was banned because of its connection to the feminist movement.

Feminism, if anything, has appeared majorly in the literature spectrum through all decades and forms. Feminism is the political, cultural, or economic movement aimed at establishing equality and protection for all women. No matter the time period or place feminism has always been a popular literary topic that has made a few works quite notorious, including Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen. Both works contain the scenarios in which the main characters are taken advantage of due to the apparent feminist society.

In Kate Chopin’s novel, “The Awakening”, Edna finds herself in a society where women were socially confined to be mothers and wives. This novel embodies the struggle of women in the society for independence along with the presence of women struggling to live up to the demands that their strict culture has placed upon them. A part of Edna wants to meet the standards of mother and wife that society has set, however her biggest desire is to be a woman free from the oppression of a society that is male dominant. Readers will find that the foundation of “The Awakening” the feminist perspective because of the passion that Edna has for gaining her own identity, and independence,