THE MINISTRY OF THE HIGHER AND SECONDARY SPECIAL

EDUCATION OF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN

THE UZBEK STATE WORLD LANGUAGES UNIVERSITY

On the rights of manuscript

SAYFUDINOVA OMINA ABDURASULOVNA

KATE CHOPIN AND PROBLEMS OF WOMEN IN HER

WORKS

Specialty: 5A 120101

Literary study (the English literature)

Dissertation for Master’s Degree

The work has been discussed Scientific advisor:

and recommended for defense Ph. D. associate Professor

The Head of Department Muratova E.D.

―___‖_______________ 2013

1
 Content

Introduction……………………………………………………………………….3

Chapter I Feminism and problems of women in American Literature……….6

§1. Feminism and the waves of feminism………………………………………6

§2. Kate Chopin‘s life and its impact on her literary work……………………26

§3. Kate Chopin‘s contribution to the feministic literature……………………31

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………..42

Chapter II Kate Chopin and the reflection of women’s status in her

works……………………………………………………………………………...45

§1. Women characters in Kate Chopin‘s works…………………………………..45

§2. Historical and Cultural Background of The Awakening……………………...59

§3. Women problems for identity in Kate Chopin‘s novel The Awakening……...66

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..88

Final Conclusion………………………………………………………………92

List of Literature used………………………………………………………..99

2
 Introduction

In our dissertation paper we are going to analyze the problems of women

in Kate Chopin‘s works. Therefore we decided to analyze feminism and feministic
issues in our paper. Our government pays great attention to the education. Learning
foreign languages is very important in our country nowadays. As president Islam
Karimov said: ―At present great importance is attached to the study and teaching of
foreign languages. No doubt, it happens not without purpose. Today the
importance of our people‘s perfect knowledge of foreign languages can scarcely be
exaggerated as our country aspires to win a descent place in the world community,
because our people see their great future as a life in mutual accord and cooperation
with their foreign partners.‖1 Thus the learning of foreign languages in
accompanied by a deep study of history and culture of those countries the language
it which we study. And it is impossible to do without literature, which enables the
leaders to penetrate deeply to the ―mood‖ of the nation, its custom and traditions
and the style of life in general. We hope this dissertation paper will contribute to
literary studies in its depth and make clear on feministic literature.

There were a lot of feminists like Kate Chopin who contributed feministic
literature however some of them were useless. The topicality of our theme is to
analyze Kate Chopin‘s works which really reflect the status of women in her time
and their involvement in the world feminist movement.

The aim of our work is to study and analyze the status of women in the XIX
century America and its impact on the world feminism through Kate Chopin‘s
works.

In order to achieve the aim of our project we set up several tasks:

1) To study feminism and history of feminism

2) To study about Kate Chopin‘s biography and its impact on her works

I.Karimov. Harmoniously developed generation is the basis of progress of Uzbekistan. Tashkent 1997. The chief
editing office of the ―sharq‖ publishing concern 1997 p. 9
3
3) To analyze Kate Chopin‘s novel The Awakening and her short stories as The
Story of an Hour, Her Letters, The Storm, A Pair of Silk Stockings, Desire’s
Baby and Regret.
4) To analyze the relation of women problem in Kate Chopin‘sabove
mentioned works.

The novelty of this work is representing the most important information

about Kate Chopin and her works. Crucial researches of women‘s problem in
them which has not been so far thoroughly analyzed in our country.

The object of the given researches is Kate Chopin‘s novel The Awakening
and her short stories.

The subject of this work is that we‘ve given a lot of information about
feminism and analyzed The Awakening.

Theoretical value of the research. The results of the work can be applied
during the lectures on history of feminism, history of feministic criticism and
history of feministic movements.
The practical value of this dissertation paper can be seen in the defined,
peculiarities of Kate Chopin‘s works and feministic literature. This work can be
used as one of the themes in teaching literature to students and also it is good
practice to understand feminism and Kate Chopin‘s themes in her works.

Methodology of the research. Analytical and comparative structures have

been used in this dissertation paper.

The structure of the work. The dissertation paper consists of Introduction,

two chapters with three paragraphs in each one, conclusions to the chapters,
final conclusion and the list of literature.

Introduction states the topicality, aim and task novelty, methods, theoretical
and practical importance of the work.

4
Chapter I is entitled Feminism and problems of women in American
Literature.

In the first paragraph of this chapter we analyzed the Feminism and the waves of
feminism. Kate Chopin was also a feminist writer who depicted women‘s grief and
status at that time.

In the second paragraph we did researches on Kate Chopin‘s life which could
open us clear explanation why Kate Chopin wrote about women and their
problems.

In the third paragraph of the first chapter we analyzed Kate Chopin‘s

contribution to the feministic literature through her novel The Awakening and some
short stories.

The second chapter is entitled Kate Chopin and the importance of women
status in her works. In the first paragraph of this chapter we tried to analyze
women characters in Kate Chopin‘s works. In this paragraph we analyzed on Kate
Chopin‘s heroines, their life and environment. In the second and third paragraphs
we concentrated on analysis of Kate Chopin‘s masterpiece The Awakening. In the
third paragraph we analyzed women problems for identity in her novel The
Awakening. Moreover we did researches on other main characters‘ positions at that
time.

Every chapter contains conclusions. In the final conclusion we gave the results
of our research in the dissertation paper, summarizing the main points of the and
gave our opinion about it.

The List of Literature presents the books, articles, essays, the sources, internet sites
which we used for writing this work.

5
Chapter I. Feminism and problems of women in American Literature.

§1. Feminism and the waves of feminism

Feminism is the movement which meant actions for establishing and

defending equal political, economic and social rights for women. This includes
trying to establish equal opportunities for women in education and employment.

Women's rights, such as contract law, property, and voting – while also
promoting bodily integrity, autonomy, and reproductive rights were limited for
women. Feminist campaigns have changed societies, particularly in the West, by
achieving women's suffrage, gender equality, equal pay for women, reproductive
rights for women (including access to contraceptives and abortion), and the right
to enter into contracts and own property. Feminists have worked to protect
women and girls from domestic violence, sexual harassment, and sexual assault.
They have also advocated for workplace rights, including maternity leave, and
against forms of discrimination against women.

When we look back to the history, we can see that the French philosopher,
Charles Fourier, firstly used the word "feminism" in 1837.1 The words
"feminism" and "feminist" first appeared in France and the Netherlands in
1872,2 Great Britain in 1890s, and the United States in 19103, and the Oxford
English Dictionary lists 1894 as the year of the first appearance of "feminist"
and 1895 for "feminism".4 Today the Oxford English Dictionary defines a
feminist as "an advocate or supporter of the rights and equality of women".5

1. Goldstein 1982, p.92.Goldstein, L (1982). "Early Feminist Themes in French Utopian Socialism: The St.-Simonians and Fourier",
Journal of the History of Ideas, vol.43, No. 1.
2. Dutch feminist pioneer Mina Kruseman in a letter to Alexandre Dumas – in: Maria Grever, Strijd tegen de stilte. Johanna Naber
(1859-1941) en de vrouwenstem in geschiedenis (Hilversum 1994) ISBN 065503951, page 31
3. Offen, Karen. "Les origines des mots 'feminisme' et 'feministe'". Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine. July–September 1987
34: 492
4. Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.). Clarendon Press. 1989.
5. Oxford English Dictionary (online ed.). Oxford University Press. June 2012. (Definition is of noun.)

6
 However there were many movements or ideas which tried to obtain women‘s
rights from early history. People and activists who discussed or advanced
women‘s issues prior to the existance of the feminist movement are sometimes
сcalled protofeminists. But some scholars criticize the usage of this term. Other
scholars believe that this term expresses the importance of earlier contributions.

Christine de Pizan , the Italian writer of the fifteenth century was the first
woman to write about the relation of the sexes and the author of Epître au Dieu
d'Amour (Epistle to the God of Love). She was the first who wrote about women
and women‘s defense. Her works were recognized by famous feminist writers
and she was accepted as protofeminist. Christine de Pizan (also seen as de Pisan)
(1364 – c. 1430) was an Italian- French author who challenged stereotypes
prevalent in the late medieval culture. As a poet, she was famous in her own
day; she completed 41 works during her 30 year career (1399–1429), and can be
regarded as Europe‘s first professional woman-writer.

When we look through her early poetry, we can see that it is marked by her
knowledge of aristocratic custom and fashion of the day, particularly involving
women and the practice of chivalry. Certain scholars have argued that she
should be seen as an early feminist who efficiently used language to convey that
women could play an important role within society. This characterization has
been challenged by other critics who claim either that it is an anachronistic use
of the word, or that her beliefs were not progressive enough to give such a
designation.

Depending on history, culture and country, feminists around the world have
had different motive and goals. Most western feminist historians believe that all
movements that work to obtain women's rights should be considered feminist
movements, even when they did not (or do not) apply the term to themselves. In
the history of the modern western feminist movement there are three "waves"of

7
feminism, according to the investigation of the scholars involved in the research.
Each wave discusses different aspects of the same feminist issues. The three
main waves have their roots in periods of organized agitation for social change -
-Abolitionism, Progressivism, "the Sixties" -- and each has been shaped by the
movements which gave them birth.

The first wave included women's suffrage movements of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, promoting women's right to vote. The second wave
was associated with the ideas and actions of the women's liberation movement
beginning in the 1960s. The second wave discussed legal and social equality for
women. The third wave is a continuation of, and a reaction to, the failures of
second-wave feminism, beginning in the 1990s. First-wave feminism involved a
period of feminist activity during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
especially in Europe and in the English speaking countries; it focused primarily
on gaining the right of women's suffrage, the right to be educated, better
working conditions and double sexual standards. The term, first-wave , was
coined retrospectively after the term second-wave feminism began to be used to
describe a newer feminist movement that focused as much on fighting social and
cultural inequalities as further political inequalities.

The leaders of the feminist movement campaigned for the abolition of slavery
prior to championing women's rights in the U.S. American first-wave feminism
involved a wide range of women, some belonging to conservative Christian
groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union organization which
aimed to make pure life and to educate and encourage communities and
governments to make wise decisions in order to protect society from the dangers
associated with alcohol, tobacco, drugs, prostitution and slavery. This
organization was organized on December 23, 1873 in Hillsboro, Ohio. It was
one of the most important organizations by women which showed women‘s
action in the nineteenth century.
8
 The role women would play in the society began to change completely in the
nineteenth century in America. This was the beginning of a whole new world for
women, and America in general. Women began to understand that there were
opportunities for them outside of the home, and that they could have a place in
the world as well as men. It was a time when the feministic view was being born
and traditional views of women were changing. First, women would play a part
in working to help slaves gain their freedom in the anti-slavery movement. They
felt they could identify with the way slaves were being treated, therefore wanted
to help them. Middle class women then would begin to realize that they were
just the same as men, and wanted to be treated that way, and take part in the
same activities. This included getting an education, working and being able to
support themselves without the help of men. This changed not only the
traditional roles of women in society, but also their role in the family. With
women wanting the right to vote, work and go to school, middle class life as
they knew it would be drastically changed. Women would no longer be in the
home with the children cooking and cleaning; they wanted to get out into the
world. There was still an extremely long way to go before women were to be
accepted in society, and this was just the beginning.
When we look through the history of abolitionism in America, we can see that
there were active women who contributed to the freedom of slaves. The
American abolitionists and women-writers such as Angelina Grimke (1805 –
1879), Sarah Grimke (1792 –1873), and Abbey Kelley (1811 – 1887) were a
few of the major feminists during this time. These women became the first
women in America to do lecture tours before audiences that included men, about
anti-slavery. They believed that women should be grateful to slaves because
giving them freedom would lead to society‘s granting of women‘s freedom. In

the United States first-wave feminism is considered to have ended with the
passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

9
 Organizing the antislavery campaign of this time helped a perfect cause for
women to take up, identify with and learn political skills from. Trying not to
give access to women only fuelled their attempts further. The American
abolitionists and women-writers Sarah and Angelina Grimké moved rapidly
from the liberation of slaves to the liberation of women.

The most influential primary feminist writer of the time was the colourful
journalist editor, and women's rights advocate Margaret Fuller whose Woman in
the Nineteenth Century was published in 1845 and accepted as the first major
feminist work in the United States. Her death encouraged Europe for the New
York Tribune to create a universality in the women's rights movement. There
are some important figures which are urgent to be mentioned when we talk
about feminism in America. An American social activist, abolitionist Elizabeth
Cady Stanton (1815 –1902) organized the first U.S. women‘s rights convention
in Seneca Falls, New York, to discuss women‘s civil rights. The organizers of
this event considered themselves patriots and viewed women‘s rights as part of
the American Revolution‘s ideals of equality and justice for all. Elizabeth
Stanton wrote a Declaration of Sentiments to demand political equality and
voting rights for women. She used language similar to make comprehensive to
all women. At the meeting in Seneca Falls, more than 300 men and women
discussed the Declaration and debated 12 resolutions that proclaimed women‘s
rights and equality. Over the course of discussion, each resolution was agreed
except for the resolution that called for women‘s suffrage. Even for some people
who strongly supported women‘s rights, the idea of women voting in elections
was unthinkable. However women never gave up. E. C. Stanton was also editor
of the first journal devoted to women, The Revolution. It firstly published on
January 8, 1868 in New York City. The motto of the journal was: “The true
republic – men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing
less.” The publisher and business manager of this journal was American civil

10
rights leader Susan B. Anthony (1820 – 1906). She was one of the most
important figures who fought for women‘s rights.

The women-teachers also suffered by discrimination at that time because

women-teachers were not paid the same as men-teachers and they were not
accepted as smart as men. Women-teachers also shouldn‘t be married. Susan
Brownell Anthony was the first who asked equality to the women-teachers as
the men-teachers. Moreover, Anthony played a prominent role in the anti-
slavery and temperance movements in New York. Susan Anthony and Elizabeth
Stanton then organized the first women's state temperance society in America
during 1852. The next year Anthony attended her first women's rights
convention in Syracuse, New York and soon after began devoting herself to
advancing women's rights. Stanton was a close friend and colleague of
Anthony's throughout their lives. The two women traveled the United States
together, giving speeches and urging equal treatment of women in the law and in
society. From 1853 to 1860, Anthony campaigned in New York State for the
Married Women's Property Bill, which became law, allowing married women to
own property, keep their wages and have custody of their children. Anthony
gained recognition as one of the most capable and zealous advocates of
complete legal equality, as well as renown as a public speaker and writer.
Elizabeth Stanton met Lucretia Mott (1793 –1880) in London in 1840, who was
an American Quaker, abolitionist, a women's rights activist, and a social
reformer. She was against slavery and considered an evil who supported it. Even
she refused to use cotton cloth, cane sugar and other slavery-produced goods as
other Quakers. In 1821 Lucretia Mott became a Quaker minister then she
travelled to give lectures around the world. Mott continued her work for the
abolitionist cause. She managed their household budget to extend hospitality to
guests, including fugitive slaves, and donate to charities. Mott was praised for
her ability to maintain her household while contributing to the cause. Mott
attended the General Anti-Slavery Convention, better known as the World‘s
11
Anti-Slavery Convention, in London, England. In spite of Mott‘s status as one
of six women delegates, before conference began, the men voted to exclude the
American women from participating, and the female delegates were required to
sit in a segregated area. Moreover important social men of the time generally
prohibited women‘s participation in public political life. However some
important men figures protested women‘s exclusion. These unfair attitudes
toward women fuelled up and developed women‘s movements. In 1848, Mott
and Stanton held a woman's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, where
a declaration of independence for women was drafted.

When we analyze the main figures who had great contribution to feminism we
can read Susan B. Anthony‘s quotes and her agitation to future generation. As
Susan B. Anthony said: “I never saw that great woman, Mary Wollstanecraft,
but I have read her eloquent and unanswerable arguments in behalf of liberty of
womankind. I have met and known most of the progressive women who came
after her – Lucretia Mott, the Grimke sisters, Elizabeth Candy Stanton, Lucy
Stone – a long galaxy of great women… Those older women have gone on, and
most of those who worked with me in the early years have gone. I am here for a
little time only and then my place will be filled as theirs was filled. The fight
must not cease; you must see that it does not stop. ”1 Here we can see that Susan
Anthony mentioned great feminists and we also mentioned them but not Lucy
Stone. A prominent American abolitionist and suffragist, and a vocal advocate
Lucy Stone (1818 –1893) helped to organize the first National Women's Rights
Convention in 1850. She was the first who retained her own last name after
marriage. Furthermore, she was the first woman who earned a college degree.
Lucy Stone spoke out for women's rights and against slavery at a time when
women were discouraged and prevented from public speaking.

1. http://quotes.dictionary.com/I_never_saw_that_great_woman_Mary_Wollstonecraft

12
 She was also one of the teachers who suffered by discrimination of female
teachers. She replaced a male teacher but got less than half part of his wage.
When Lucy Stone made her first speech, which was given at the invitation of
local anti-slavery in celebration of the anniversary of West Indian emancipation,
she was boasted by her clear full tone. She contributed to feminism not only
with her speeches but also publishing lectures about women‘s rights and
convention proceedings in weekly and long-running Women’s Journal.

An Native American activist Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826 –1898) who was
a suffragist, an abolitionist, a freethinker, and a prolific author saw E. C. Stanton
at the church as a major obstacle to women's rights.1 They therefore welcomed the
emerging literature on matriarchy, and both Gage and Stanton produced works on
this topic: one of them is The Woman's Bible which is a two-part book, written by
E. C. Stanton and a committee of 26 women, and published in 1895 and 1898 to
challenge the traditional position of religious accepted theory that a woman have to
obey to a man. E.C. Stanton wished to promote a radical liberating theology, one
that stressed self-development by producing this book. E.C. Stanton wrote also
"The Matriarchate or Mother-Age, related to social issues as religion, marriage,
and race. M.J. Gage wrote "Woman, Church and State" which was one of the first
books to draw the conclusion that Christianity was making primary difficulties to the
progress of women, as well as civilization.

Related to the women at that time, E.C. Stanton made a witty observation
regarding assumptions of female being lower in status "The worst feature of
these assumptions is that women themselves believe them".2 Feminism became
widely known in the U.S by 1913. Major issues in the 1910s and 1920s included
suffrage, economics and employment, sexualities and families, war and peace,

1. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. The Matriarchate or Mother-Age, in Avery, Rachel Foster (ed.), Transactions of the National Council
of Women of the United States. Philadelphia 1891
2. Murphy, Cullen. The Word According to Eve, First Mariner Books, 1999, pp. 21–23. ISBN 0-395-70113-9

13
 and a Constitutional amendment for equality.

Both equality and difference were seen as highways to women's empowerment.

These movements helped to establish a lot of organizations which we think it is
important to be mentioned.

Organizations at the time included the National Woman's Party that was
a women's organization founded by Alice Paul in 1913, particularly for the right to
vote on the same terms as men, suffrage advocacy groups such as the National
American Woman Suffrage Association which was formed in May 1890. It was the
largest and most important suffrage organization in the United States, and was the
primary promoter of women's right to vote and the National League of Women
Voters that was founded on February 14, 1920, in Chicago, Illinois by Carrie
Chapman Catt. Related to career associations such as the American Association of
University Women which was founded in 1882, their aim was to
advance equity for women and girls through advocacy, and education, the
National Federation of Business and Professional Women's Clubs is an
organization focused on creating successful workplaces by focusing on issues that
impact women, families and employers, which began their action in 1919, and the
National Women's Trade Union League which was formed in 1903 to support the
efforts of women to organize labor unions and to eliminate sweatshop conditions.It
is urgent to mention the importance of the war and peace groups such as the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom which was formed in 1915
to study and make known the causes of war and work for a permanent peace by
women with different political views and religious background, and the
International Council of Women, which brought women to one main aim to work
across national boundaries for the common cause of advocating human rights for
women. By analyzing these organizations we can see that the women were active
to establish their rights and they struggled not only for their equal rights, also they
wanted to set up their importance in society.
14
 The fight for women's suffrage represents one of the most fundamental struggles
of women, because denying their representation in public governmental bodies
gave an unambiguous message of second-class citizenship. However it took a long
time to work its way up the list of the most important matters to gradually become
the dominant issue. The French Revolution moved quickly on this, with the
assertions of Condorcet and de Gouges, and it was women who led the march on
Versailles in 1789. This reached its climax with the founding of the women
Political club – Society of Revolutionary Republican Women , formed in 1793,
which included suffrage on its agenda, before being suppressed at the end of that
year. However, this ensured that the issue was on the European political agenda.

Analyzing the feminism in Britain, we see that the women‘s suffrage began in
1872 as a national movement and it ariseed in the writings of Anna Doyle
Wheeler (1785-1848). A writer and advocate Doyle Ann had been closely
associated with feminist movement, and is best known for her writing on behalf
of women‘s liberty and education. She was the most important single builder of
cross-national women‘s connection during the early nineteenth century. As a
strong feminist, she was one of the first women to speak in the rostrum in
England. She called for the creation of an organization which would work to
improve the status of women and remove the disabilities women endure. Anna
could show each argument that men used and encouraged women to work
together. Her feministic works include The Rights of Women (1830) and Letter
from Vlasta (1833). Apart from her works, she had become a means of
spreading political and feminist ideas. Her close friend William Thompson
(1775-1833) who was an Irish political and philosophical writer, his ideas at
women‘s suffrage was influenced by Ann Wheeler. His book An Inquiry into the
Principles of the Distribution of Wealth (1824) became a seminal study of social
inequality. William Thompson is also celebrated for his championship of
women‘s rights. With his companion, Anna Doyle Wheeler, he authored The
Appeal of One Half of the Human Race: Women against the Pretensions of the
15
Other (1825). It was the first major statement on women‘s right to political
equality written in the English language. William Thompson was also
committed to the co-operative ideal, which he advocated in Practical Directions
for the Establishment of Communities (1830). He passionately believed in the
right to an education for every citizen. One of the important feminists in the
U.K. is Barbara Leigh Smith (1827 –1891) who was an English educationalist,
artist, and activist. She showed a force of character and catholicity of sympathy
that later won her a prominent place among philanthropists and social workers.
She and a group of friends began to meet regularly during the 1850s in Langham
Place in London to discuss women's rights, and became known as "The Ladies
of Langham Place". This became one of the first organised women‘s movements
in Britain. They pursued many causes vigorously, including their Married
Women‘s Property Committee. In 1854 she published her Brief Summary of the
Laws of England concerning Women, which had a useful effect in helping
forward the passage of the Married Women's Property Act 1882, which allowed
married women to own and control their own property. She met with L. Mott in
18581 and reported on Mott‘s pleasure at learning about women‘s rights in
England. This meeting strengthened the link between the feminist movements
on each side of the Atlantic.

In 1858, she set up the English Women's Journal as an organ for discussing
employment and equality issues directly concerning women, in particular
manual or intellectual industrial employment, expansion of employment
opportunities, and the reform of laws pertaining to the sexes. When we analyze
British feminism we can see a lot of important women who were active and
contributed deal of to feminism in nineteenth century.

The Langham Place ladies also played one of the central roles in women's

1. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. The Matriarchate or Mother-Age, in Avery, Rachel Foster (ed.), Transactions of the National Council of
Women of the United States. Philadelphia 1891

16
suffrage, and set up a suffrage committee in 1866 at a meeting at Elizabeth
Garrett's home, renamed the London Society for Women's Suffrage in 1867. Soon
similar committees had spread across the country, raising formal requests, and
worked closely with John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), a British philosopher, political
economist and civil servant. Denied outlets by establishment of periodicals, Lydia
Becker (1827-1890), was an amateur scientist and feminist leader, who started the
Women's Suffrage Journal between 1870 and 1890.

However the political pressure continued, the other publications of the

movement‘s journals were problematic issue. Despite this, women benefited from
their increasing political experience, which translated into slow progress at the
level of local government and public bodies. However, the years of frustration took
their toll, and many women became increasingly radicalised. Some refused to pay
taxes, and Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928), who was a British political activist
and leader and her husband emerged as the dominant influence of the movement,
having also founded the Women's Franchise League , which advocated suffrage for
women in 1889. The organisation's main achievement was to secure the vote for
women in local elections after the campaigning of its members. Emmeline
Pankhurst helped women to get right to vote. As I mentioned above, a lot of strong
feminists tried to get women‘s right, however the members of parliament promised
to give right to women to vote but they always postponed. By 1903 Pankhurst
believed that years of moderate speeches and promises about women's suffrage
from members of parliament had yielded no progress. Although suffrage bills in
1870, 1886, and 1897 had shown promise, each was defeated. She doubted that
political parties, with their many agenda items, would ever make women's suffrage
a priority. She even broke with the Independent Labour Party(ILP) when it refused
to focus on votes for women. It was necessary to abandon the patient tactics of
existing advocacy groups, she believed, in favour of more militant actions. Thus on
10 October 1903 Pankhurst and several colleagues founded the Women's Social
and Political Union (WSPU), an organisation open only to women and focused
17
on direct action to win the vote.1 "Deeds," she wrote later, "not words, was to be
our permanent motto."2 Pankhursts took the political initiative, forming the
Women's Social and Political Union. As Emmline Pankhurst put it, votes for
women were seen then as no longer "a right, but as a desperate necessity". At the
state level, Australia and the United States had already given the vote to some
women, and American feminists such as Susan B Anthony (1820-1906) a
prominent American civil rights leader visited Britain in 1902. While the WSPU
(The Women's Social and Political Union) is the best known suffrage group, it was
only one of many, such as the Women's Freedom League and the National Union
of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) led by Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847-
1929) was an English suffragist.

WSPU was largely a family affair, although externally financed. Christabel

Pankhurst (1880-1958) who was a suffragette became the dominant figure and
gathered friends and active suffragettes such as Annie Kenney (1879-1953), Flora
Drummond (1878-1949), Teresa Billington (1877-1964), Ethel Smythe (1858-
1944), and Norah Dacre Fox (1878-1961) later known as Norah Elam. Veterans
such as Elizabeth Garrett (1836-1917) also joined.

Looking back from the XXI century, we may say that western women's rights
movements seem to be ruled by the increasing clamour for political reform and
votes for women. Books, articles, speeches, pictures and papers from the period
however, show a various range of theme's being discussed in the public speeches.
In The Netherlands for instance, rights to medical care, educational rights, better
working conditions, and peace were main feminist issues at the time. And
feminists called themselves feminists without a lot of troubles and difficulties.

In 1906 the Daily Mail first labeled these women "suffragettes" as a form of

1. E. Pankhurst, My own story (London, Eveleigh Nash, 1984) p.38

18
ridicule, but the term was quickly embraced in Britain to describe a more militant
form of suffragist, which were becoming increasingly visible with their marches
and distinctive Green, Purple and White emblems, while the Artists' Suffrage
League created dramatic graphics. Even underwear in WPSU colours appeared in
stores. They quickly learned new ways of exploiting the media and photography.
As the movement became more active, deep divisions appeared with older leaders
of the movement parting company with the radicals. Sometimes the splits were
ideological, and others tactical. Even Christabel's sister, Sylvia, was expelled.

Slowly but surely the protests became more vigorous and included heckling,
banging on doors, smashing shop windows. In 1913, one member of the group,
Emily Davison (1872-1913) who was a militant activist, sacrificed herself on
Derby Day, dying under the King's horse. These tactics produced mixed results of
sympathy and alienation and many protesters were imprisoned, creating an
increasingly embarrassing situation for the government.

Matters progressively worsened, with hunger strikes, then risky force feeding, and
eventually the notorious Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913,
nicknamed the “Cat and Mouse Act” was an Act of Parliament which made legal
the hunger strikes that Suffragettes were undertaking at the time and stated that
they would be released from prison as soon as they become ill. It could be argued,
however, as did Reginald McKenna, the Home Secretary, that this was relatively
humane, since a number of these women appeared ready to die for their cause.

If the aims were to reveal institutional sexism in British society, women's

suffragists certainly created publicity around the issue. They also inadvertently
drew attention to the brutality of the legal system at the time. Women were not
prohibited from voting in theUnited Kingdom until the 1832 Reform Act which
was an Act of Parliament (2 & 3 Will. IV) that introduced wide-ranging changes to
the electoral system of England and Wales and also the 1835 Municipal

19
Corporations Act was an Act of theParliament of the United Kingdom that
reformed local government in the incorporated boroughs of England and Wales.

After hardworking and never giving up, women's demand for the vote was
achieved in the Representation of the People Act 1918 which was an Act of
Parliament. This act was the first to include practically all men in the political
system and began the inclusion of women. It enacted in February of that year and
gave men near-universal suffrage and the vote to women over 30 years of age. The
terms of this act were:1‖

1. All adult males gain the vote, as long as they are 21 years old or over and
are resident in the constituency
2. Women over 30 years old receive the vote but they have to be either a
member or married to a member of the Local Government Register, or a
graduate voting in a University constituency…”

The Representation of the People Act 1918 was expanded to Representation of

the People Act 1928 which was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
This Act finally had given some women the vote in Parliamentary election for the
first time after World War I.

It also shifted the socioeconomic make up of the electorate towards the working
class, favouring the Labour Party who were more sympathetic to women's issues.
The first election was held in December, and gave Labour the most seats in the
house to date. The electoral reforms also allowed women to run for parliament.
Although Christabel Pankhurst narrowly failed to win a seat in 1918, in 1919 and
1920 both Lady Astor and Margaret Wintringham won seats for the Conservatives
and Liberals respectively, by succeeding their husband's seats. When we look
through at twentieth century feminism we can see, feminist science fiction

1. Fraser, Sir Hugh. ―The Representation of the People Act, 1918 with explanatory notes” Internet Achieve.

20
emerged as a sub-genre of science fiction which tends to deal with women's roles
in society at the beginning of the twentieth century. Women writers in the utopian
literature movement of the nineteenth and early twentiesth centuries, at the time of
first wave feminism, often addressed sexism. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-
1935), who was a prominent American sociologist, novelist, writer and lecturer,
did so in Herland (1915), for example. The Sultana's Dream (1905) by Bengali
Muslim feminist, Roquia Sakhawat Hussain, depicts a gender-reversed purdah in a
futuristic world.

During the 1920s writers such as Clare Winger Harris and Gertrude Barrows
Bennett published science fiction stories written from female perspectives and
occasionally dealt with gender and sexuality-based topics.

During the First World War women were active in society however it entered the
labour market in unprecedented numbers, often in new sectors. They discovered
that their works outside their homes were now valued, but also left large numbers
of women bereaved and with a net loss of household income. Meanwhile the large
numbers of men killed and wounded created a major shift in demographic
composition. War also split the feminist groups. Women's Support Roles in the
World Wars Right up to the outbreak of World War I, feminists on both sides pledged
themselves to peace, in transnational women‘s solidarity. Within months of the war‘s
outbreak, however, “all the major feminist groups of the belligerents had given a new
pledge – to support their respective governments.” Women did a lot to help their
country in their difficult situation and they did it bravely. So women organizers
changed to support organizations to the war effort. Many of these feminists hoped that
patriotic support of the war would develop the prospects for women‘s suffrage after
the war, and this came true in a number of countries. After changing their decision
they hoped for future rights and they showed themselves as brave as men.

The more than 25,000 US women, who served in Europe in World War, so on an

21
entrepreneurial basis, especially before 1917. They helped nurse the wounded,
provide food and other supplies to the military, serve as telephone operators, entertain
troops, and work as journalists. Many of these “self-selected adventurous women …
found their own work, improvised their own tools … argued, persuaded, and
scrounged for supplies. They created new organizations where none had existed.”
Despite hardships, the women had ―fun‖ and ―were glad they went.‖ Women sent out
to ―canteen‖ for the US Army – providing entertainment, sewing on buttons, handing
out cigarettes and sweets – were ―virtuous women‖ sent to ―keep the boys straight.‖
Army efforts to keep women to the rear proved difficult. “Women kept ignoring
orders to leave the troops they were looking after, and bobbing up again after they
had been sent to the rear.” Some of the US women became ―horrifyingly
bloodthirsty‖ in response to atrocity stories and exposure to the effects of combat.
Looking back, the American women exhibited ―contradictory feelings” of sadness
about the war, horror at what they had seen, and pride in their own work. Mary
Borden, a Baltimore millionaire who set up a hospital unit at the front from 1914 to
1918, wrote: “Just as you send your clothes to the laundry and mend them when they
come back, so we send our men to the trenches and mend them when they come back
again. You send your socks … again and again just as many times as they will stand
it. And then you throw them away. And we send our men to the war again and again
… just until they are dead.”1

Certain recent feminist scholars, such as Francoise Thebaud and Nancy Cott,
also point out World War I's conservativizing effect in some countries, noting the
reinforcement of traditional imagery as well as literature directed towards
motherhood. These phenomena during World War I and between the two wars
have been called the "nationalization of women‖.

In the years between the wars, women continued to fight discrimination and
opposition to women's rights from the establishment and the media.

1. Schneider, Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider. 1991. Into the Breach: American Women Overseas in World War I. New York: Viking.

22
An English modernist writer Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) wrote an extended essay
A Room of One's Own which was published in 1929.The title of the essay comes
from Woolf‘s motto that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she
is to write fiction.”1In this essay Woolf describes the extent of the backlash and her
frustration at the waste of so much talent. Important writers of the time also
included Rebecca West. Although the word "feminism" was now in use, the media
and others gave it such a negative image, that women were afraid to embrace it. In
1938, Woolf published a book-length essay Three Guineas, "an old word...that has
much harm in its day and is now obsolete". On another occasion she had to defend
West, who had been attacked as a "feminist".

In the 1920s, the non-traditional styles and attitudes of flappers gained popularity
among women in the U.S. and U.K.

Women received the vote in Denmark and Iceland in 1915 (full in 1919), the
USSR in 1917, Austria, Germany and Canada in 1918, and many countries
including the Netherlands in 1919, and Turkey and South Africa in 1930. French
women did not receive the vote till 1945.

As with many movements, women soon discovered that political change does not
necessarily translate into a noticeable change in circumstances, and with economic
recession they were the most vulnerable sector of the workforce. Some women
who had held jobs prior to the war were obliged to give them up to returning
soldiers, and many had been made redundant. With limitedrights to vote , the
Suffragists needed to change its role. The new organisation called the National
Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC)1 still advocated equality in
voting but extended its purpose to examine equality in the social and economic
area. Legislative reform was sought for those laws that were discriminatory,
including family law and prostitution. One area of division which is significant in

1. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1989. 4.

23
the light of later developments was between equality and equity, which addressed
accommodation to allow women to overcome barriers to fulfillment. An
independent British Member of Parliament Eleanor Rathbone succeeded Millicent
Garrett, who was an English suffragist, as president in 1919. She expressed the
critical need for consideration of difference in gender relationships as "what
women need to fulfill the potentialities of their own natures". A more formal split
appeared with the 1924 Labour government's social reforms, with a splinter group
of strict egalitarians forming the Open Door Council organization in May 1926.2

The Second World War made to do double duty for many American women—
they retained their domestic chores and often added a paid job, especially one
related to a war industry. After the World War II, it began new period in feminism.

Much more so than in the previous war, large numbers of women were hired for
unskilled or semi-skilled jobs in munitions, and barriers against married women
taking jobs were eased.

Second-wave feminism refers to a period of feminist activity beginning in the

early 1960s and through the late 1980s. Second Wave Feminism has existed
continuously since then, and continues to coexist with what some people call Third
Wave Feminism. Second wave feminism saw cultural and political inequalities as
inextricably linked. The movement encouraged women to understand aspects of
their personal lives as deeply politicized, and reflective of a sexist structure of
power.

In 1963, Betty Friedan published her exposé The Feminine Mystique, giving a
voice to the discontent and disorientation many women felt in being shunted into
homemaking positions after graduating from college. In the book, Friedan explored

1. Records of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship. London Metropolitan University, Women's Library. Archives in
London
2. Records of the Open Door Council. London Metropolitan University, Women's Library. Archives in London

24
the roots of the change in women's roles from essential workforce during World
War II to homebound housewife and mother after the war, and assessed the forces
that drove this change in perception of women's roles. Over the following decade,
the phrase and concept "Women's Liberation" began to be discussed.

1960s' feminism — and its theory and activism — was informed and fueled by
the social, cultural, and political climate of that decade. This was a time when there
was an increasing entry of women into higher education, the establishment of
academic women's studies courses and feminist thinking in many other related
fields such as politics, sociology, history and literature, and a time when there was
increasing questioning of accepted standards.

It also became increasingly evident, almost from the beginning that the Women's
Liberation movement consisted of multiple "feminisms" — due to the diverse
origins from which groups had coalesced and intersected, and the complexity and
contentiousness of the issues involved. Starting in the 1980s, one of the most vocal
critics of the whole movement has been called bell hooks, who comments on lack
of voice by the most oppressed women, glossing over of race and class as
inequalities, and failure to address the issues that divided women.

Third Wave Feminism resisted the perceived essentialist ideologies and a white,
heterosexual, middle class focus of second wave feminism, third wave feminism
borrows from post-structural and contemporary gender and race theories to expand
on marginalized populations' experiences. Third-wave feminism began in the early
1990s, arising as a response to perceived failures of the second wave and to
address the backlash against initiatives and movements created by the second
wave. However, the fundamental rights and programs gained by feminist activists
of the second wave – including the creation of domestic-abuse shelters for women
and children and the acknowledgment of abuse and rape of women on a public
level, access to contraception and other reproductive services (including the

25
legalization of abortion), the creation and enforcement of sexual-harassment
policies for women in the workplace, child-care services, equal or greater
educational and extracurricular funding for young women, women's
studies programs, and much more — have also served as a foundation and a tool
for third-wave feminists.

Throughout its history, Third Wave Feminism has been led by a number of
courageous and important women who have made substantial contributions to
feminist thought and theory. Of particular note, of course, is Rebecca Walker,
whose seminal article gave a name to the burgeoning movement and brought some
its central issues to light. Third Wave Feminism continues to be a substantial voice
in culture as a whole, and it continues to seek for the betterment of women across
class, and race.

§2. Kate Chopin’s life and its impact on her literary work.

When we analyzed Kate Chopin‘s life and works, we may say that she also
contributed to Feminism in the 19th century and was celebrated with her novel The
Awakening which expresses the frustrations and the triumphs in a woman's life.

Kate Chopin was born on February 8, 1850, in St.Louis, the eastern border of
Missouri, USA . Her father, Thomas O‘Flaherty was a successful businessman
who had emigrated from Galway, Ireland. Her mother, Eliza Faris, was a well-
connected member of the French community in St. Louis. Her maternal
grandmother, Athénaïse Charleville, was of French Canadian descent. Some of her
ancestors were among the first European inhabitants of Dauphin Island, Alabama.
She was the third of five children, but her sisters died in infancy and her brothers
(from her father's first marriage) in their early twenties. She was thus the only child
to live past the age of twenty-five. The O‘Flahertys was member of the Creole
social elite and fairly well-off. When Kate was very young, her father Thomas

26
O'Flaherty died in a work-related accident. He left behind a family of four
generations of women all living in the same house. After her father's death in 1855,
Chopin developed a close relationship with her mother, grandmother, and her
great-grandmother. Kate was very close to her maternal great-grandmother,
Madame Charleville, who first introduced her to the world of storytelling. Madame
Charleville spoke only French to Kate and told her elaborate, somewhat risqué
stories. She taught Kate not only music, history, and speaking French; she also
stressed the need to live life "clearly and fearlessly." Through vivid French stories,
she gave Kate a taste of the culture and freedom allowed by the French that many
Americans during that time disapproved of. Many of the common themes in her
grandmother's stories consisted of women struggling with morality, freedom,
convention, and desire. The spirit of these stories endures in Kate's own works.

Kate was blessed by having many female mentors throughout her childhood;
either the strong and independent widows in her family or the intellectual nuns of
her school, who taught Kate to live a "life of the mind as well as the life of the
home." Kate was a young age of five and a half when her parents sent her to the
Academy of the Sacred Heart.

Two years after her fathers' death, Kate returned to the Academy of the Sacred
Heart. Kate met a girl named Kitty Garesche. The two girls both loved to write and
read together, but in May of 1861 the Civil War broke out in St. Louis, and Kitty's
family was banished for their Confederate "sympathies." Not only did Kate lose
her best friend, but also her half brother, George, who died of typhoid fever and
her grandmother passed away at the age of 83. Kate lost all of her brothers and
sisters, so that by the time Kate was 24 years old, she was the only child. When she
graduated from the Academy of the Sacred Heart, she was known as a brilliant
storyteller, an honors student, a youthful cynic, and an accomplished pianist. After
the war, Kate almost had a depressed manner and one of the nuns of the Academy
recognized the creativity in this lonely child. The nun assigned her to write a

27
Commonplace Book, which is the first document of Kate's writings. This
Commonplace Book became a diary of her intellectual and social life.
One of Kate's teachers, a Sacred Nun named Madam (Mary Philomena) O'Meara,
first encouraged her to write. Writing helped Kate express her sense of humor and
resolve her painful feelings of war and death. Teachers and classmates soon
recognized her talent of being a gifted storyteller.

At age 18, Kate graduated from the academy and made her social debut.
Although she preferred to spend time alone reading instead of attending socials all
night, Kate was a natural conversationalist. She followed the traditional custom of
debuting, but she wanted to escape from the parties and the social expectations.
She wrote in her diary: "I dance with people I despise ... return home at day break
with my brain in a state which was never intended for it .... I am diametrically
opposed to parties and balls; and yet when I broach the subject - they either laugh
at me – imagining that I wish to perpetrate a joke; or look very serious, shake their
heads and tell me not to encourage such silly notions."

Her diary entries also show a very moody woman exhausted of that her privacy
and freedom were taken away from her. During this time, she wrote her first story,
Emancipation: A Life Fable, a short story about freedom and limitation.
Kate married Oscar Chopin and moved to New Orleans on June 9, 1870. Her
marriage to Oscar was not antithesis of what she demanded out of life. She did not
sacrifice her spiritual freedom by marrying him and continued to violate all the
rules of expected female behavior. She rolled and smoked Cuban cigars. Her
clothes were flashy and stylish, yet always memorable and pretty. After moving to
Cloutierville, Louisiana in 1879, she rode horses in addition to taking walks, but if
she was in a hurry, she had a reputation of jumping on her horse and galloping
away through the middle of town. She did what she wanted to do and refused to
conform to tradition for tradition's sake.
Kate and Oscar had all six of their children within the first ten years of marriage.

28
Kate allowed their children as much freedom as possible and permitted them to
enjoy their youth with playing, music, and dancing. Although Kate loved her
children, motherhood often consumed her so she traveled to familiar places such as
St. Louis and the Grand Isle as much as possible. Her children came with her since
family and friends would be available to watch them.
When Oscar could no longer work at a cotton factory in New Orleans, Kate,
Oscar, and the children moved to Natchitoches Parish. They settled in
Cloutierville, Louisiana where Oscar opened a general store and managed nearby
land. A few months before his death, Oscar suffered from fever attacks. The
country doctor misdiagnosed the illness and without the proper treatment, Oscar
died on December 10, 1882.

Oscar had left Kate with a failing business and six small children to raise. He
left Kate with $12,000 in debt (approximately $250,000 in 2009 money).
According to American critic Emily Toth, "for a while the widow Kate ran her
husband’s business and flirted outrageously with local men; (she even engaged in
a relationship with a married farmer.)"1. Chopin made an honest effort to keep her
late husband's plantation and general store alive, two years later she sold her
Louisiana business. She ran the store, paid off the debt, and managed the property
for two years before moving back to St. Louis to live closer to her mother and to
provide better educational opportunities for her children. Some theorists say that
Kate also wanted to leave Albert Sampite, a married man whom many believe she
had a romantic affair with after Oscar's death. Her mother died a year after Kate
returned to St. Louis. Her mother's death affected her the most. She had barely
recovered from Oscar's sudden death only to face her mother's sudden death. As a
result, she was reintroduced to one of her favorite childhood activities: writing.
After the death of her mother, Dr. Frederick Kolbenheyer, her obstetrician and
family doctor, recognized that her writing was fluent or persuasive and encouraged

1. Toth, Emily. Kate Chopin’s Private Paper, Bloomindton,Indiana 47404-3797USA

29
her to write short stories as a form of therapy. Much like Madam O'Meara at the
academy, Dr. Kolbenheyer recognized Kate's literary style of writing in the letters
she wrote to him and her friends. He believed women should not be discouraged
from having careers and advised Kate to write as a means of emotional therapy and
financial support. She later models Dr. Mandelet in The Awakening after him.
By the early 1890s, Kate Chopin was writing short stories, articles, and
translations which appeared in periodicals, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
She was quite successful and placed many of her publications in literary
magazines. But she became known only as a regional local color writer and her
literary qualities were overlooked.
She published her first short story, A Point at Issue! in the St. Louis Post-
Dispatch on October 27, 1889 and a few months later, "Philadelphia Musical
Journal" published "Wiser Than God." Her first novel, "At Fault" is published in
September 1890 at her own expense. Around this same time, she became a charter
member of the Wednesday Club, which was founded by Charlotte Stearns Eliot,
T.S Eliot's mother. She eventually resigned from the club and satirized it in her
later works. She continued writing and publishing more stories in magazines and
newspapers such as "Vogue," "Youth's Companion," and "Harper's Young People,"
but it wasn't until March 1894 when Houghton Mifflin published "Bayou Folk"
that Kate became nationally known as a short story writer. She published the
second volume of short stories, "A Night in Acadie," in November 1897.
Herbert S. Stone & Company published her most famous work, "The
Awakening," in 1899. Many believed that her book was banned due to its
"controversial" topics dealing with women, marriage, sexual desire, and suicide.
According to Emily Toth, the book was never banned, but it did receive negative
reviews. The following year, Herbert S. Stone and Company reversed its decision
to publish the third collection of short stories. Kate did not write much afterwards
because no one would buy her stories. Her last published story was "Polly" in
1902. Two years later, Kate collapses at the St. Louis World's Fair and dies two

30
days later from complications of a stroke.
After her death, her writings were ignored until 1932 when Daniel Rankin
published "Kate Chopin and Her Creole Stories," the first biography on Kate, but
his text presents a very limited view and showed her only as a local colorist. It
wasn't until 1969 when Per Seyersted published "Kate Chopin: A Critical
Biography," which sparked a new age of Chopin readers. Ten years later, he and
Emily Toth publish a collection of Kate's letters and journal entries called A "Kate
Chopin Miscellany". Both Seyersted and Toth have taken a great interest in the
writer and have provided the world more access to Chopin's life and work. In 1990,
Toth published one of the most comprehensive biographies on Chopin and a year
later, she published Kate's third volume of short stories, "A Vocation and A Voice,"
the volume Herbert S. Stone and Company refused to publish. In the past two
years, Toth has released another text titled "Kate Chopin's Private Papers" and
Toth published another biography, "Unveiling Kate Chopin". Both books include
journal entries, manuscripts, and other information discovered in the past 10 years.

§3. Kate Chopin’s contribution to the feminist literature

Analyzing Kate Chopin‘s life in the previous paragraph, we can say that Kate
Chopin contributed to feminism with her works. ―Love and passion, marriage and
independence, freedom and restraint.‖ These are the themes that are represented
and worked with throughout Kate Chopin‘s works. As we know, Kate Chopin
followed the similar path of a woman of her era and lived like other women at that
time. She married at the age of twenty. Becoming a mother soon after, having six
children, nothing out of the ordinary woman she had to follow made her write
about women‘s feelings and grief of that time. Her husband‘s death and her
children‘s supporting made her be strong and look for the job. Seeking professional
help, Kate decided to enter the writing industry as it was a potentially profitable
outlet for her feelings. Said feelings led her to pen social commentary which
effectively laid the groundwork for first wave feminism. Kate Chopin wrote many
31
different things during her career which helped make her a famous author. She
uses the French Creole and Acadian (early French-speaking settlers in Acadia)
cultures of Louisiana as both setting and symbol throughout her stories. Chopin‘s
stories contain much psychological insight that draws attention to her characters
and plots. While Chopin also shows recurring themes of feminism, she is also well
known in American literature for her use of southern regionalism. Kate Chopin is
able to use the physical setting in her stories to emphasize important themes, affect
the psychology of the characters, and add to the ambiance of her stories.

Her best known short story, published in 1894 suitably titled The Story of an
Hour, is about a wife who confronts her inner demons and finds that, despite
society wanting her to, she does not fully love her husband and is relieved to hear
of his demise. Succeeding this was her indisputably most controversial work, an
1899 novel called The Awakening, which reached into the sticky subjects of
adultery and non-marital cohabitation. This novel is considered by many critics
“as the first aesthetically successful novel to have been written by an American
woman.”1

The Awakening is highly controversial in its time; The Awakening deals with the
condition of the nineteenth century woman in marriage, and has been more
recently rediscovered and recognized as an overtly feminist text for these same
reasons. This novel, however, represents only the climax of a literary career spent
almost exclusively in the composition of short fiction. It was the absorbing of the
short story genre that allowed Chopin to complete her final work, to develop a
style best suited to her thematic concerns.

From literary point of view we may say that all writers have their predecessors or
another writer whom they appreciate, in Chopin's case it appears that one man in

1. Elaine Showalter, Sister‘s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 65.

32
particular was highly influential, French writer Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)
who was considered one of the fathers of the modern short story, took the literary
world by storm in 1880 with pieces. When we look through American Professor
Helen Taylor‘s Gender, Race and Region in the Writing of Grace King, Ruth
McEnery Stuart and Kate Chopin we can see a lot of certain examples and Helen
Taylor said: Kate Chopin in some way 'brought into' the French male literary
tradition which presented itself to her in the form of Maupassant's short fiction is
undeniable. It is a fact alluded to repeatedly in the criticism surrounding her work,
in that of recent years and also in the words of her contemporary reviewers.
Maupassant has indeed been identified by one critic as Chopin's greatest literary
"mentor”1. However, the most direct assertion of his impact comes from Chopin
herself in an unpublished essay entitled "Confidences" (1896). Here she expresses
obvious admiration for the French 'master' as she recalls her reaction to "stumbling
upon" a volume of his tales eight years earlier:

"...I read his stories and marveled at them. Here was life, not fiction; for where
were the plots, the old fashioned mechanism and stage trapping that in a vague,
unthinking way I had fancied were essential to the art of story making. Here was a
man who had escaped from tradition and authority, who had entered into himself
and looked out upon life through his own being and with his own eyes; and who, in
a direct and simple way, told us what he saw..."2

When we read another critic John Raymon‘s ideas on the form of Kate Chopin‘s
short story, we can reassure that Kate Chopin used Maupassantian‘s short stories
form. ―Chopin's fictional writing in the short story form can be seen to stand as
further testimony to this high regard, albeit more implicitly. Perhaps most obvious

1. Taylor, Helen. Gender, Race and Region in the Writing of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart and Kate Chopin. Baton Rouge and
London: Louisiana State UP, 1989
2. Chopin, Kate. "Confidences" The Complete Works of Kate Chopin Ed. Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State UP,
1969. pp700-702

33
is her adoption of Maupassantian form, the very aspect of writing which is seen to
have most concerned the French man himself.”1

This very 'gendered' originality is best seen in Chopin's treatment of male-female

relationships. Her innovation lies not so much in the theme itself, because in these
terms Chopin's work can indeed be seen as a response to European works in
general - works which focused predominantly on gender and which, as Helen
Taylor proposes, "...shared her concerns with questions of sexuality, bourgeois
marriage and woman's role.2

And Maupassant, as one of the leading creators of such works, explored these
issues at length, not only acknowledging the existence of Eros, but also helping
extend the limits of literary treatment of sex. As literate and critic Mary
Donaldson-Evans reveals in her A Woman's Revenge, Maupassant treats his
heroines as objects:

"...women are objects of erotic delight, intended for the pleasure and adornment of
the male, and their physical beauty is paramount...The pleasure that the possession
of a beautiful woman affords is entirely physical and is coupled by an absolute
disdain for her 'being' 3

Kate Chopin writes described women with their feelings and grief around her.
She explores and articulates what she saw in life for women.

Chopin's feminism certainly is a major theme, but an instructor must be careful

not to overstate it. Chopin seems to have believed that men and women alike have
great difficulty reconciling their need to live as discrete individuals with their need
to live in close relationship with a mate; these conflicting needs lie at the center of

1. Dugan, John Raymon. Illusion and Reality: A study of the Descriptive Techniques on the Works of Guy de Mauspassant. Paris:
Mouton, 1973
2. Taylor, Helen. Gender, Race and Region in the Writing of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart and Kate Chopin. Baton Rouge and
London: Louisiana State UP, 1989 p 157
3. Donaldson-Evans, Mary. A Woman's Revenge: The Chronology of Dispossession in Maupassant's Fiction. Lexington, Kentucky:
French Forum, 1986
34
her work. However, Chopin said herself that she was neither a feminist nor a
suffragist; she was simply a woman who took other women intensely seriously.
Chopin believed women had the ability to be strong, individual, and free-spirited.
She herself reached out, in hopes for freedom, and the freedom to explore and
express ideas. Therefore she described the women at that time.

Chopin's simultaneous, and seemingly paradoxical, adherence to and subversion

of the andocentric French influence is clearly apparent in a story which appears to
have suffered much neglect from critics on the whole, a 1894 piece entitled Her
Letters. The story was written at a time during which Maupassant's influence on
Chopin was reaching new heights – the time of her translation of several of the
French man's works into English.

“Her Letters” deals with the most heavy of human topics including love, death,
grief, doubt and memory. Chopin translated eight Maupassant stories in all
between1894 and 1898 and the process of doing so greatly influenced her own
writing, in terms of both structure and subject matter. It was at this time that
Chopin made a move away from the local colour tradition which had previously
shaped her work, shifting her interest from regional Southern issues and
experimenting with more complex forms, as charted by scientist Richard Fusco
who wrote about short story writers. Ultimately, the 'flavour' of Chopin's writing
was becoming increasingly Maupassantian. It would seem that she was, as Taylor
propounds, "...through the discipline and challenge of translation... rethinking her
mentor in terms of her own work"1.

But at the same time Chopin was becoming more deeply involved in a subject
which placed her in direct opposition to her French mentor – the subject of woman
and her struggle to assert an individual identity beyond the bounds of that inscribed

1. Taylor, Helen. Gender, Race and Region in the Writing of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart and Kate Chopin. Baton Rouge and London:
Louisiana State UP, 1989 p160

35
by the dictators of patriarchy. This subject is central to Her Letters, and serves to
make this story an excellent example of the way in which Chopin uses a male form
and conforms to male convention only to subvert it, and cleverly so, from within
its own bounds, exposing and, further, exploiting the patriarchal domain.

If Her Letters shows clear elements of Chopin's Maupassantian imitation, this

imitation was undoubtedly coloured by her parallel practice of translation. Chopin
intended to bring together in publication the first six of her Maupassant translations
and the proposed title for this collection is very telling in terms of where her
interests lay at the time. They were to be labeled "Mad Stories", dealing as they do
with man's insanity and the descent into madness and Chopin carries this theme
quite definitely over into her own work with Her Letters focusing on a male
protagonist falling victim to this sad decline. The way in which Chopin charts this
decline is similarly drawn directly from Maupassant's tales of madness,
specifically in terms of form, a subject on which Richard Fusco has much to say.
He identifies Chopin's translations as sharing not only thematic concerns but also a
structural element, all being examples of what he names the 'descending helical', a
chronologically structured form which traces, step by step, the protagonist's
descent into insanity, "...each successive sentence portray a situation more
desperate, a narrator acting more frenzied, a mind one step farther removed from
normality" 1.

Through the process of completing these translations Chopin apparently gained

insight into this form as an alternative way of shaping a story, eventually absorbing
it into her own work.

A case can be made then – in writing Her Letters Chopin undoubtedly borrowed
a great deal from the French 'master', engaging herself in a degree of imitation.

1. Fusco, Richard. Maupassant and the American Short Story: The Influence of Form at the Turn of the Century. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania
State UP, 1994 p 50

36
Even the opening of the story, which centers not on the male protagonist but on his
wife, is also similar of Maupassantian‘s technique.

The story opens with a render being introduced to a woman who has obviously
been engaged in a passionate love affair and is reliving precious moments shared
with her lover through all that remains of their relationship, the woman has another
man in her life, a husband in fact. And so it is revealed that the affair so dear to her
still was an adulterous one. The woman fully acknowledges what discovery of
these words of unfaithfulness would do to her partner in marriage, but, facing
death, she makes a startling decision that seems to deny this acknowledgement; she
decides that she will not destroy the evidence of her love leaving the letters instead
to her husband's care that he will himself destroy them. This seems a cruel request
to make of the man whom she has betrayed, the man, and thus, a typically
patriarchal base is laid for the story. It is with the man, with the male protagonist,
that our sympathy lies. Chopin, it seems, is conforming to male convention – here
is the very portrayal of woman as monster established by her literary forefather: a
woman as a killer of a man, the key to his demise.

In turning back to this opening 'frame' after reading the remainder of the story,
however – after registering the meaning of her husband's reaction to the letters
after her death – we gain a strikingly different perspective and our own initial
reactions to the woman are reversed. It is with her that we find Chopin's true
sympathies to lie rather than confirming patriarchal notions of womanhood,
Chopin's story, and more specifically the letters that lie there in, actually subvert
these constructions. It is through these letters that Chopin speaks out against the
condition of the nineteenth century woman. Through the letters the woman is able
to speak out from within the paradigms of patriarchy; she is given a voice, an
autonomous identity; she is made subject, even in death. And at the same time, in
creating this subversive voice, Chopin too undermines patriarchy from within its

37
own form – that which mimics Maupassant. She speaks out from within this form
with a voice that is truly her own.

The husband's initial reaction to the letters is one of disbelief. Their existence
suggests that his wife has kept something from him, and this, in his mind, is
impossibility: "...She had never seemed in her lifetime to have had a secret from
him. He knew her to be cold and passionless, but true, and watchful of his comfort
and happiness...".1

Immediately we are aware that this is a man who, it seems, did not know his
wife as well as he thought. Her own reaction to the letters in the story's opening
'frame' suggests that she is far from "cold and passionless" in nature. It is in no way
an emotionally restrained woman that devours their contents with such animalistic
fervor: " . . . it stirred her still to-day, as it had done a hundred times before when
she had thought of it. She crushed it between her palms when she found it. She
kissed it again and again. With her sharp white teeth she tore the far corner from
the letter, where the name was written; she bit the torn scrap and tasted it between
her lips and upon her tongue like some god-given morsel ". 2

Yet this sensual side to her nature is one that her husband has clearly not seen, or
has chosen not to see. He has seen her only in the roles which she is expected to
fulfill in marriage, roles of service to him, roles true to nineteenth century ideals of
womanhood. He has inscribed this identity upon her. Here enters the subversive
power of the letters - through them her patriarchal identity is shattered.

The woman's husband becomes hounded by questions: if his wife was not what
he supposed her to be, not the ideal of womanhood, then what was she? What
secret did she hold? He can see only one possible answer, an answer which reveals

1. "Her Letters" Ed. Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State UP, 1969. pp3 401
2. Ibid p 309

38
his absolute immersion in the conventions of patriarchy. If not the ideal woman he
thought her to be, his wife must have been unfaithful. Any suggestion of having a
positive autonomous being is denied her. His wife is to him an object, something to
be possessed, both physically and mentally. Her secret stands in the way of this
possession.

Chopin's male protagonist has exposed himself, or rather, has exposed the
workings of patriarchy. For it is the workings of this society which Chopin sets out
to critique, not the individual; the workings of a world in which, as Simone de
Beauvoir suggests in The Second Sex, "...humanity is male and man defines
woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous
being", a world in which man is subject and the absolute - Woman is but
"Other".1

But at no point in her work does Chopin show, some critics claim, any direct
antagonism toward men. They refuse to simply reverse Maupassant's view, to
make men the central target of her heroines' despair in direct opposition to his
image of woman as man-killer. As Professor Helen Taylor suggests, Chopin's
interests lie rather in the institutions and social frameworks within which both man
and woman are trapped.2 It is this "man-instinct of possession", a term that in itself
suggests the trait as being in no way unique to him as an individual, that has
created the situation in which the male protagonist finds himself. A rereading of
the apparent opening 'frame' is thus required, further exploration of alternative
meanings it may hold.

In this undertaking it becomes clearly apparent that the woman of the story is
unhappy in her marriage, a fact reflected in the elements of the outside world. In
such a world she is destined to become cold and passionless. Marriage comes to

1. Beauvoir, Simone de. The second Sex Trans. H. M. Parshley. London: Picador, 1988 p19
2. Taylor, Helen. Gender, Race and Region in the Writing of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart and Kate Chopin. Baton Rouge and
London: Louisiana State UP, 1989 p161

39
represent death, a death of the true independent self. Through marriage, woman's
erotic life is suppressed; she becomes nothing but her husband's "Other" half.1 This
woman has been sustained only by the letters, for it is only through these that she
can reach her true self – her passionate inner being. The death of marriage has
forced this woman to find herself, and autonomous fulfillment, outside of its
bounds.

Perhaps more startling than this situation itself, however, is this woman's
reaction against it, a reaction which is embodied in her decision not to destroy the
letters. In making this decision, the woman takes control of her destiny, or, at least,
the destiny of her identity, and ultimately becomes subject, subverting the
patriarchal world which attempts to objectify her. To destroy the letters would be
to destroy the only remaining portion of her inner being, to give into the self
constructed for her by her husband, the patriarchal agent. Instead, in keeping them
alive she allows for escape into the world of her true self, escape from the
oppressive world of marriage: "It was not sealed; only a bit of string held the
wrapper, which she could remove and replace at will whenever the humor came to
her to pass an hour in some intoxicating dream of the days when she felt she had
lived "2

Living on even after her death, the letters become truly subversive. The
woman's husband claims knowledge of their meaning, but out of "his loyalty and
his love" he casts them into the river without truly knowing, and in doing so
destroys all possibility of ever truly knowing. The letters live on in his mind and
uncertainty feeds on them. His wife becomes a mystery to him, becomes the
unidentifiable and the unknown. He cannot possess her – male ownership of
women is destroyed.

1. Beauvoir, Simone de. The second Sex Trans. H. M. Parshley. London: Picador, 1988 p 451 48
2. “Her Letters‖ Ed. Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State UP, 1969. Pp3 400

40
 We can see woman‘s mystery at the same time woman‘s grief on holding lies
from Her Letters. It is one of Kate Chopin‘s absorbing short stories which
described inner side of women.

As we know, most of Chopin‘s major characters in her stories are married

women. Trough a woman‘s point of view, Chopin tries to capture the women‘s
struggles and presents reality to her reader. From her writing, one can learn a lot
about marriage as well as women‘s position and condition in her time. In her story,
Kate Chopin is believed to attempt to deconstruct the ideas of a wife and a mother,
which are previously constructed and assigned by the patriarchal world.

When we analyze Kate Chopin‘s short stories, we can separate some of them
which have feminist issues. Not only married woman, but also a mother suffered
by difficulties of life at that time. A Pair of Silk Stocking is portrayed as a good and
dedicated mother. In this story Kate Chopin depicted Mrs. Sommer in two sides‘
positive and negative images. We suppose that Chopin just wanted to imply that a
mother is only a human being who also desires. According to French feminist
Simone de Beauvoir, a mother is defined as a sign of her existence in the world and
society. Unfortunately, the role has trapped women into the image of a good
mother, who believes that a mother‘s priority focuses only on her family (husband,
children, and household). Often a woman‘s desire and individuality are oppressed
by her role as a mother and by a high standard of a good mother, which is set by
society. A woman as a mother often forgets about herself as an individual and turns
to be immanence in the family interest. Kate Chopin could open the sorrow of
mothers who forget themselves.

From analyzing Kate Chopin‘s contribution to the feminism we can call Kate
Chopin one of the important feminist writers although she didn‘t call herself a
feminist, because she could depict a woman at her time as a married woman and as
a mother.

41
 Conclusion

In the first chapter of our dissertation paper, we analyzed the feminism and the
history of feminism in the USA and the UK. As we know from history, women
were discriminated and accepted as low status people by men. They had various
limitations in society and at home. The role of women and their political,
economic, and social rights were not shifted till early twentieth century. They were
excepted to get married, have children, raise families and perform the duties of
hardworking wives and mothers. These attitudes toward women brought to usage
the word ―feminism‖. This word first appeared in France. Italian writer Christine
de Pizan was the first woman to write about woman‘s problem in the fifteenth
century. She was accepted as a primary feminist or pro-feminist writer. Even
though there are a lot of debatable arguments to call Christine de Pizan a feminist
or not, we believe that she was the first who discussed women‘s issues and
regarded as Europe‘s first professional woman-writer.

In the history of the modern western feminist movement there are three ―waves‖
of feminism, according to the goals and endures of the scholars involved in the
research. As we discussed in the first chapter, each wave refers to different aspects
of the same feminist issues. First-wave feminism term came after coming the
second-wave feminism term. First wave feminism focused on gaining the right of
women‘s suffrage, the right to be educated, better working conditions and double
sexual standards in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United
States and Europe. The first wave ended with the introduction of the women's right
to vote. Second wave was more concerned with the restoration of all the rights that
women had been denied in the past. This was extended by the fact that a large
share of women had entered into the working environment after the second world
war. Consequently, this wave was more broadly based because its primary concern
was the restoration of women's economic, political and social rights so as to place
them in the same category as their male. The third-wave feminism continued the

42
second-wave feminism and was a response to the perceived failures. Moreover we
analyzed the history of feminism in the U.S. and U.K.

Our main aim in dissertation paper is Kate Chopin and her works which depicted
women‘s problems. Therefore we did researches of Kate Chopin‘s biography to
know the influences on the writer, why she wrote feminist issues in her works.
Kate could see the problems of these women and she also felt sorrow as their grief
during her life. However she was able to write women‘s problem in contrast to the
women around her. Chopin said herself that she was neither a feminist nor a
suffragist; she was simply a women had the ability to be strong, individual, and
free-spirited. She was also a strong woman because she herself reached out, in
hope for freedom, and the freedom to explore and express ideas.

The third paragraph of this chapter is devoted to the analysis of Kate Chopin‘s
contribution to the feministic literature. Kate Chopin contributed to feminism a
great deal with her novel The Awakening and some of her short stories are about
women and their problems. As we know, Kate Chopin followed the similar path of
a woman of her era and lived like other women at that time. Seeking professional
help, Kate decided to enter the writing industry as it was a potentially profitable
outlet for her feelings. Kate Chopin is able to use the physical setting in her stories
to emphasize important themes, affect the psychology of the characters, and add to
the ambiance of her stories.

The Awakening is Kate Chopin‘s second novel which is highly controversial in

its time. The Awakening deals with the condition of the nineteenth century woman
in marriage, and recognized as feminist text for these same reasons. “Her Letters”
deals with the most heavy of human topics including love, death, grief, doubt and
memory. It is one of Kate Chopin‘s absorbing short stories which described inner
side of women.

43
 As a conclusion we say that Kate Chopin contributed a lot to feminism with her
works about women. Trough a woman‘s point of view, Chopin tries to capture the
women‘s struggles and presents reality to her reader. From her writing, one can
learn a lot about marriage as well as women‘s position and conditions in her time.

44
 Chapter II. Kate Chopin and the reflection of women’s status in her works.

§1. Women characters in Kate Chopin’s works

Analyzing critical works about Kate Chopin and her biography, we came to
conclusion that Kate Chopin had different lifestyles throughout her life. These
lifestyles provided her with insights, understanding and allowed her an analysis of
late nineteenth century American society. At that time the status of women was
discriminated and there were movements we mentioned above. Kate Chopin
endured to open the life of women in most of her works. Kate Chopin's writing
career includes a variety of forms, like novels, with dozens of short stories as well
as some poetry. Kate Chopin had two novels At Fault and The Awakening which
describe women trying to obtain freedom. Moreover she published two collections
of short stories: Bayou Folk, Night in Arcadia and a lot of uncollected short stories.
In most of her works women were the main protagonists and women problems and
issues were discussed. In the second chapter , we are going to analyze her novels:
At Fault and The Awakening and her short stories: The Story of an Hour, The
Storm, Madame Célestin's Divorce, Athénaïse, Regret, and A Pair of Silk
Stockings.
The female characters portrayed in Kate Chopin's literary works are insecure,
unsatisfied, unsettled, and searching for a personal identity free from societal
pressures and influences. Chopin's works, The Storm, The Story of an Hour, and
The Awakening, express the women protagonists' quests for individuality and their
equal desires to overcome societal pressures. Kate Chopin acknowledges sexuality
in women and women's rights in a time period where these issues were unspoken
and unacceptable.

At Fault was Kate Chopin‘s first novel but it was not her first literary work,
she had completed at least four short stories and some poetry in two years before
the novel was published. However it was her first attempt at longer fiction. When
the novel first published in 1890, many critics have been less approving. For

45
example Critic Seyersted says “the novel as a whole shows that she was not ready
for longer forms of fiction”1. We don‘t want to say that the novel is perfect.
However it centers the freedom and we can say it depicts women status at that
time. At Fault is both romantic and filled with stark realism it is a love story that
expands to address the complex problem of balancing personal happiness and
social duty, set in the post-Reconstruction South against a backdrop of economic
devastation and simmering racial tensions. Written at the beginning of her
career, At Fault parallels Chopin's own life and introduces characters and themes
that appear in her later works, including The Awakening. The action is set in a
place and period of American history – French speaking Creole Louisiana – that
has been abandoned by mainstream media but Chopin only has time to sketch the
distinctive culture here. Two features stand out, the casual old fashioned racism
(with ‗Darkies‘, ‗Niggers‘ and similar on every page) and the placing of a Catholic
Creole woman – Therese Lafirme – at the heart of the action. Therese has inherited
and manages a substantial plantation and she is treated as an equal or more so by
everyone regardless of sex or social position. Whether this reflects the reality of
Creole Louisiana or wishful thinking by Chopin we cannot say, but it creates the
backbone for a potentially fascinating story as Therese tries to use this power and
her influence for good. The upshot is the old road to Hell being paved with good
intentions, and Therese creates an ocean of wretchedness in her saintly attempts to
do the right thing. She persuades her new lover, David Hosmet, to remarry his
viscous drunk ex-wife, with predictable results, she murderously indulges her
tenant Marie Louise in allowing her to live too close to the river, and fatally
messes up the life of her nephew, Gregoire. She is indeed At Fault.

At Fault is the story of a love triangle complicated by the constraints of social

mores and values in the rural post-reconstruction South. Chopin examines the
constraints on the interior lives of women, their disillusionment, and their attempts

1. Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1969.

46
to achieve fulfillment in pre feminist times.

The Awakening first published, in 1899, in New Orleans and the Southern
Louisiana coast at the end of the nineteenth century. Kate Chopin firstly titled this
novel A Solitary Soul but then after unknown reasons she changed it to The
Awakening. The plot centers around Edna Pontellier , the novel's main protagonist
– the wife of Léonce and the mother of two boys – she is presented as a complex
and emotionally dynamic character and her struggle to reconcile her increasingly
unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social
attitudes of the turn-of-the-century South. It is one of the earliest American novels
that focus on women's issues without condescension. It is also widely seen as a
landmark work of early feminism.

The novel's blend of realistic narrative, incisive social commentary, and

psychological complexity makes The Awakening a precursor of American
modernism. By studying other female characters in The Awakening, students will
see how Chopin carefully provided many examples of a socially acceptable "role"
that Edna could adopt a perfect mother and wife, like Madame Ratignolle (who
represents, in part), an independent but somewhat ostracized "old maid" like
Mademoiselle Reisz (who represents, in part, the artist), the "flirt" like Mariequita,
one of the "young lovers" (they are never seen apart, and never described as
independent of the other), a pious, almost single-mindedly religious, woman like
the "lady in black," a servant to her children like the quadroon nurse, and so on.
The novella, then, both portrays regional stereotypes while also criticizing cultural
attachment to those stereotypes. Kate Chopin's narrative style in The Awakening
can be categorized as naturalism.

The men, likewise, operate as changeable for these choices. Edna's husband, a
stern patriarch Leónce Pontellier, and her children create the space for Edna to be

47
like Madame Ratignolle. Alcée's presence allows her to be in a somewhat thrilling,
but ultimately empty extra-marital relationship.

. The Story of an Hour is a short story centering on a young married woman of

the late nineteenth century as she reacts to a report that her husband has died in a
train accident. It was first published in Vogue magazine December 6, 1894, under
the title "The Dream of an Hour." On January 5, 1895, Sue V. Moore, a journalist
friend of Chopin, reprinted the story in St. Louis Life, a newspaper of which Sue V.
Moore was editor. Over the years, it was republished again and again in literature
anthologies under the title The Story of an Hour. Kate Chopin is description
realistically confronts the possibilities that life gives individual consciousness and
individual choice in this story. Kate Chopin tackles complex issues involved in the
interplay of female independence, love, and marriage through her brief but
effective characterization of the supposedly widowed Louise Mallard in her last
hour of life. After discovering that her husband has died in a train accident, Mrs.
Mallard faces conflicting emotions of grief at her husband's death and exultation at
the prospects for freedom in the remainder of her life. The latter emotion
eventually takes precedence in her thoughts. As with many successful short stories,
however, the story does not end peacefully at this point but instead creates a
climactic twist. The reversal – the revelation that her husband did not die after all –
shatters Louise's vision of her new life and ironically creates a tragic ending out of
what initially appeared to be a accidental turn of events. As a result, it is Mr.
Mallard who is free of Mrs. Mallard, although we do not learn whether the same
interplay of conflicting emotions occurs for him. Chopin presents Mrs. Mallard as
a sympathetic character with strength and insight. As Louise understands the
world, to lose her strongest familial relationship is not a great loss so much as an
opportunity to move beyond the "blind persistence" of the bondage of personal
relationships. In particular, American wives in the late nineteenth century were
legally bound to their husbands' power and status, but because widows did not bear
the responsibility of finding or following a husband, they gained more legal
48
recognition and often had more control over their lives. Although Chopin does not
specifically cite the contemporary second-class situation of women in the text,
Mrs. Mallard's exclamations of "Free! Body and soul free!" are highly suggestive
of the historical context. Society in late nineteenth century expected women to
keep house, cook, bear and rear children—but little more. Despite efforts of
women‘s-rights activists such as Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan
B. Anthony, women still had not received the right to vote in national elections by
the century‘s end. Moreover, employers generally discriminated against women by
hiring them for menial jobs only and paying them less than men for the same work.
The Story of an Hour hints that Mrs. Mallard‘s husband—perhaps a typical
husband of his day—dominated his wife.

The Story of an Hour takes on a very specific style and structure which is perfect
in the way in the story is written. The structure and style heightens the drama and
plot line of the story. The story follows a third-person narrative in which Mrs.
Mallard is the center of action. The non-participant narrator provides access to
Mrs. Mallard's life: her medical condition or state, her strict marriage, her lack-
luster relationship with her husband, her perspective on "love" she has for her
husband, and her perspective on her newly awakened ideas on her personal
freedom—which she associates with the death of her husband. In other words, the
narrator describes Mrs. Mallard's thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and emotions,
worries and decisions with reference to her past, present and hopes for a future in
which she becomes a free, independent individual setting the scene for the feminist
change in the 20th century. Therefore, the whole story can be seen as a deictic field
in which Mrs. Mallard is its proving by direct argument center. The use of an
omniscient third-person narrator enables Chopin to tell a complete story that's not
limited to the protagonist's point of view, but creates a sense of division in the
individual as opposed to the ideas of society.

49
There are two symbols in this short story which opens the main idea in this story.
They are Spring and Heart. Mrs. Mallard welcomes the new spring life. This
symbolizes a new beginning for her. Spring represents life and that is what Mrs.
Mallard gains as a widow. It also helps to note that spring comes after winter.
Winter can be seen as Louise while she was married to her husband. Winter is
symbolically a depressing, cold and isolated season. Contrasting that to Louise's
new-found spirit and life in the story's "Spring" setting. “She could see in the open
square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring
life.”1

The next symbol in the story is Mrs. Mallard‘s Heart. In the beginning of the
story, the reader is already aware of Louise's failing heart. It was her sister
Josephine who breaks the news to her cautiously, being mindful of her sister's
delicate condition. "Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble,
great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her
husband's death." By the end of the story, renewed with energy and a sense of
enthusiasm for the future, Louis is struck with the news that Mr. Mallard returned
home safe and sound - he didn't die from a train accident (a common cause of
death during that time period with increasing use of newer technology) as
originally thought. From the reader‘s point-of-view, when Mrs. Mallard dies - the
doctor claims “…she had died of heart disease--of the joy that kills.”2 Ironically,
she actually dies when her dreams of living without any one to answer to vanishes.
The doctor believes she died of overjoyed upon learning that her husband is alive.
But Mrs. Mallard's outward behavior stays true to the normal response her family
expected. She dies of heart failure triggered by overwhelming emotional stress. No
one will ever know that the overwhelming emotional stress was due to her loss of
hope for the future.

1. http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/hour/
2. Ibid

50
 The Story of an Hour has been strongly linked with the ideals of the Women's
liberation movement of the 1960s when feminists took a stand to fight to give
women more freedom in America. The reason "The Story of an Hour" was an
important piece of literary work at this time was because of its radical story. In the
story, this housewife who has been confined to the social norms of the obedient
wife, has an unorthodox reaction to the death of her husband. She anticipates her
newfound freedom from the suppression of her husband, of men, and becomes
invigorated by it. This idea is one of the key values of the feminist movement, and
thus The Story of an Hour was an important literary work to show a woman
breaking from the norm of society.

The denouement isn't less unexpected than Mrs. Mallard's reaction. The crucial
moment came when Mr. Mallard, which was said to be dead, safe and sound
opened the front door. Mrs. Mallard was shocked and died of heart disease. The
doctors said that it was joy that killed her. But it wasn't joy, it was despair. All her
dreams about free life were broken by her husband and she couldn't live with him
any more. She hoped that she had got rid of him, that the destiny made her a
present and all her dull life was very far. And when her husband ruined all this she
couldn't forgive him. For just an hour she was born again, lived in the world of her
dreams and died. She wanted freedom and reached it, but was dead.

Beyond the question of female independence, Louise seems to suggest that

although Brently Mallard has always treated their relationship with the best of
intentions, any human connection with such an effect of permanence and intensity,
despite its advantages, must also be a limiting factor in some respects. Even some
critics‘ descriptions seem to hint at her personality, as Chopin associates her
youthful countenance with her potential for the future while mentioning lines that
"bespoke repression and even a certain strength." Although neither her sister nor
Brently's friend Richards would be likely to understand her point of view, Louise
Mallard embraces solitude as the purest prerequisite for free choice. In The Story of
51
an Hour the marriage is an important theme which described an obedient woman‘s
grief to the marriage. In The Storm, Kate Chopin‘s next short story which describes
women‘s problem, the woman suffered by sex is a crucial part of the story. To be
more specific, adultery. Chopin uses the theme of forbidden love to tell a story that
is used to further the author's opinion. Chopin also uses symbols and clear
descriptions of her characters to her advantage. The themes of The Storm tie in
with the characters and symbols to allow Chopin to express her opinion on
sexuality and marriage. The Storm is about Calixta loosening up, but it is also
about humans' natural tendency towards being sexually active, and how they
express it. Chopin used it to express some of her disdain about the sexual standards
of her time. She thought we should be able to express these feelings without
feeling guilty or receiving flack from everyone else. She was very tuned in to her
sexuality during her life, and tried to express her feelings through some of her
writings.

The Storm explores a plethora of stormy emotions of the protagonists in the

backdrop of an unexpected storm. Though named a sequel to her earlier work “At
the Cadian Ball” (1892) it shares little resemblance to Calixta‘s daring. All
through, there is an undercurrent of pro feminism. The tale is more of a reflection
of sexually oppressed women of the 19thcentury under male control, woman
rediscovering their feminine urge, the right over their bodies and relations they
choose to have.

Every literary work is a statement by the author and a statement about the author
at the same time. An analysis of the short story cannot be separated from an
analysis of the author‘s social, temporal and political circumstances. The fact that
she lost her father early in life and her mother soon after, played a significant role
to play in her development into an introverted, reclusive individual. But as social
animals, human beings need to communicate. The only way she found fit was
through writing, which allowed her to create. One of the turning points in her life
52
were the meeting of a German woman in New Orleans who sort of became an
idealistic woman to her as she succeeded in reconciling her celebrity status as an
artist with a respectable place in society and a healthy conjugal life.

Kate Chopin used the title he Storm to illustrate this sexual restraint of this time

period. When we look this word culturally, we can say that this word is associated

with conflict, uneasiness, and confusion. Therefore Chopin used the image of the

storm to represent the sexual tension that builds throughout the story between

Alcee and Calixta.

In one point in this story Calixta betrayed to her husband and had sexual
relationship with another man during the storm when her husband was away with
her son. However some critics believe that this story has feministic issues. In spite
of this we analyzed that Kate Chopin depicted another woman‘s character and her
problems in this short story.

In Chopin‘s next interesting stories A Pair of Silk Stocking and Desiree's Baby
the negative influence of maternity because the women in these stories suffer by
the condition of being married and being mothers Mrs. Sommers, in A Pair of Silk
Stocking, devotes all her life to her children to such a degree that nothing is left to
her. She faces a minor dilemma that eventually becomes a conscious expression of
her desire to return to a past that she can no longer have, reflecting her
subconscious craving for the autonomy and independence that she does not have
while under the pressures of poverty. The nostalgic desire to reclaim past grandeur
recalls the dilemma of Ma'ame Pélagie in Chopin's eponymous short story,
although Ma'ame Pélagie lives in the past and sacrifices it for the present whereas
Mrs. Sommers lives in the present and temporarily leaves her reality in order to
recall her past. Mrs. Sommers does not merely aspire to wealth in the manner of

53
those who have never had money; instead, as Mrs. Sommers's neighbors note, she
has in fact seen better days and intuitively equates her youth with simple luxuries
such as silk stockings and kid gloves.

The second element of Mrs. Sommers's motivation for her impulse purchases
relates to her need to assert personal autonomy. As Chopin establishes at the
beginning of the story, Mrs. Sommers has several children to feed and clothe, and
her first thoughts for spending her money come directly from the need to scrimp
and save every scrap of her money. Although fifteen dollars had a great deal of
purchasing power in the 1890s, much more than it would have today, it was not a
significant amount of money for the long term. The indication that Mrs. Sommers
cannot truly afford to spend it on luxury items suggests that she is greatly
constricted in her actions by the requirements of minimum subsistence to which
she is now reduced. Thus, Mrs. Sommers's purchase of silk stockings, a plain
symbol of relatively luxurious abundance, may be interpreted as her attempt to
deny the limits characterizing her worldly situation.

If Mrs. Sommers's excesses are a refutation of the powerlessness caused by her

lack of wealth, then the manner in which she succumbs to temptation is ironic
because Chopin's narration suggests that her decision to make her purchases is not
made entirely by choice. Whereas she actively plans to buy hats and clothes for her
children, Chopin describes her as "not thinking at all" after putting on her
stockings. The tone of the narration is distant and dreamy, with a simple
description of Mrs. Sommers's actions and limited discussion of her motivations.
As a result, the protagonist seems to hold even less control over her behavior when
indulging herself than when the lack of money is the deciding factor.

The readiness with which Mrs. Sommers gives in to temptation might seem at
first glance to be a sign of succumbing or exhaustion in the face of suppressed
consumerism. Certainly, Mrs. Sommers lack of food and subsequent fatigue
provide the impetus for her initial acquisition of the silk stockings. Chopin's

54
narration, however, does not leave the impression of a woman who is weak and
easily swayed. Instead, Mrs. Sommers is not condemned and does not condemn
herself for indulging herself and providing a day of respite from her difficult life.
Even when she returns by cable car to her home, she shows no regret for her lack
of fiscal control and exhibits only a wish to continue her borrowed life. It seems
that her dominant motivation for giving in is not the crass joy of shopping but, as
in so many of Chopin's stories, a deeply held urge toward freedom, indulged here
by releasing herself, however briefly, from the bonds of relative poverty.

Although the end of A Pair of Silk Stockings does not end with Mrs. Sommers in
a position that is significantly worse than that in which she commenced the story, it
still bears an element of tragedy and loss. Fifteen dollars have been enough to
bring Mrs. Sommers back to her past and to give her an evanescent feeling of
control, but it does not suffice to change her basic situation. Although the
purchases made by Mrs. Sommers will remain with her until they wear out, almost
all of the freedom that she enjoyed will disappear once she leaves the cable car,
and she will be left again with nothing but memories and unfulfilled desires.
Desiree's Baby by Kate Chopin is a powerful story that is intriguing and
compelling. Desiree's Baby tells about racial problem at that time. This time-
period considered being black as socially devastating and the end of the world. The
intent was to keep the white race as pure as possible. Nevertheless, it is not easy to
recognize black blood by the appearance of skin. Both Desiree and Armand knew
being black or a lover of blacks was social suicide among the elite of society.

Others warned Armand about Desiree's unknown background and origin before
he married her. At that time, this did not matter to Armand. His eyes told him she
was white and her name did not matter for she was going to receive his proud
name.

Armand and Desiree were married and had a child. When Madame Valmonde
came to visit, she knew the child was not "pure" white but did not say anything to
55
Desiree. She asked about Armand reactions but offered no motherly advice.
Desiree was so naive in her happiness that she could not see the non-white features
of her son. However, everyone else knew something was not quite right.

Desiree realized that Armand was distant and avoiding her and became saddened.
In her unhappiness, she opened her eyes to the subtle realization that her son was
not completely white. Frantically, she began to seek answers. After Armand
rejected her, she turned to her mother. In her letter to her mother, she tells how she
would rather be dead than have the burden of being something other than white.
Her mother's letter was brief and supplied no satisfactory comfort.

Desiree turns to Armand hoping he could still love her. He told her he wanted her
to leave, then she concluded her life, and her son's was not worth living. Moreover,
the burden of not being white was too much to cast upon a child so she took him
away rather than have one of the slaves raise him.

Armand's selfishness became increasingly evident. He could only think of his

tarnished family name rather than love his wife and his own flesh. After
Desiree left, he began burning everything that connected him to her. Here, Armand
found a letter from his mother to his father. The letter provided some light or
darkness to Armand's past. He was angry and hurt that Desiree had tarnished his
proud family name only to discover that through his mother, he was the tarnished
one.

This is a great story that leaves the reader with unanswered questions. Chopin
leaves the reader to imagine and wonder about what an epilogue might contain.

The themes of race and racism are integral to Désirée's Baby, for prevailing ideas
of Chopin's time that African Americans were inferior to whites leads to the
destruction of Désirée and her baby. Desiree suffered by racism that her baby was
black and at the same time her baby‘s birth gave her unhappiness. However in the

56
short stories like Athenaise and Regret Kate Chopin underlines that the maternity is
a source of happiness.

In Regret the main character, Mamzelle Aurelie, is a strong, independent woman

who has never found the need for a relationship or marriage in the short story. She
is still single at the age of 50. She has never regretted being single since her
neighbor Odile has to leave her four children. She has never experienced taking
care of even one child. She struggles and complains in watching over them. Her
character is one that embraces both masculine and feminine characteristics.
Aurelie's manner of dress is masculine in nature, but as far as she's concerned,
comfortable.
She is described as wearing a "man's hat about the farm, and an old blue army
overcoat when it was cold, and sometimes top boots." For her time, this type of
dress was very unconventional. Of course, at that time to be a female land owner
and successful farmer was also avant-garde.
Aurelie's masculine characteristics eclipse her appearance and influence her life's
path. She isn't exactly the epitome of a female in touch with her feminine side and
maternal instincts. If anything, those are areas that she has ignored and allowed to
remain dormant. The arrival of Odile‘s children, which is ―so unexpected and
bewildering‖ to Aurelie, slowly works a change over in the woman. Left with
Odile‘s children so that Odile can visit her ailing mother, Aurelie first treats the
children like she was their superior officer and they were soldiers. When she is first
left with the children, Aurelie determines ―upon a line of action which should be
identical with a line of duty‖. She is rational, collected, and deals with the situation
in a practical way, all typical male characteristics. It does not take long, however,
before Aurelie is ―unearth white aprons that she had not worn in years‖ and getting
―down her sewing-basket, which she seldom used‖. The fact that Aurelie has to
unearth her aprons implies that she had buried that part of herself, putting it behind
her. Now she must face these more feminine aspects of herself as she transforms
from a military officer to a mother.
57
 Her interaction with the children leaves Mazmelle Aurelie changed, but not
transformed. The impact of their visit can be seen in the setting of the story. When
the children first arrive, they huddle in a ―narrow strip of shade‖, a foreshadowing
to the effect they will have on the house. The darkness, however, is limited in the
beginning. The ―white sunlight was beating in‖, there was the ―pleasant odor of
pinks in the air,‖ and the farm was filled with ―the sound of negroes‘ laughter‖.
Aurelie was a solitary figure, but she was not an unhappy one. She was surrounded
by light, fresh aromas, and laughter. When the children leave, however, ―the
evening shadows‖ started ―creeping and deepening around her solitary figure‖.
Aurelie had experienced a part of life that she had shut herself out from and would
never be able to have. Until she experienced the life and vibrancy children could
bring to a household, she had not realized what she was missing. This revelation
does not completely change Aurelie, indeed, when she cries she does so ―like a
man, with sobs that seemed to tear her very soul‖, but she does begin to regret the
choices she has made. ―Regret‖ begins with Aurelie, a 50 year old, unmarried
woman who runs an entire farm and manages her workforce without any desire or
need for outside assistance or even contact. When she is tasked with watching her
neighbor‘s children, a change begins to occur in Aurelie. She is forced to take on a
more feminine role, breaking out her aprons, sewing, and telling the children
stories so they can fall asleep. Aurelie is softened to the point where she cries when
the children leave because she has realized what she has missed by remaining
unmarried, but she still retains enough of her original character to cry ―like a man‖.
Regret is the best story which shows the importance of being and feeling as a
mother. When we analyzed this story we came conclusion that being women is not
obeying man, it is being kind wife and mother. It is the happiest thing to be mother.
Kate Chopin described another woman who regretted about that when she was
already late to be mother.

58
 §2. Historical and Cultural Background of The Awakening

Analyzing Kate Chopin‘s feminist works, we decided to analyze the historical

and cultural background of The Awakening which helps us show women‘s status at
that time in our research.

It was a difficult time for the United States in the late nineteenth century. The
social, scientific, and cultural sight of the country was undergoing radical changes.
Perhaps the most importantly, the women's rights movement had been gathering
momentum since 1848, when the first women's rights conference was held in
Seneca Fall, New York.

Thus for almost 50 years before Chopin published The Awakening, society had
been engaged in a struggle over social ideologies and equal rights issues.

As a result of this struggle, women as a whole had to a certain extent, already

experienced mobilization and emancipation from their socioeconomic fetters. For
the first time in America, women began to bring the formerly private issues of
home and family into the public arena.

American celebrating cultural and women‘s gender historian Mari Jo

Buhle notes that women during the post-civil war era: “ … regularly participated
in the market-place, gained their own sources of support, and broke once and for
all with humiliating forms of financial dependency on men.1

In mid-1899, nearly half a century after the women's movement officially

had begun, the cultural and social soil seemed fertile for the literary introduction of
Kate Chopin's fictional character, Edna Pontellier.

Choked by the cloistering moralistic garb of the Victorian era, yet willing
to give up everything, even her own life, for the freedom of unencumbered
individuality, Edna Pontllier was a perfect example of the superb New Woman

1. Mari Jo. Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920 (Urbana; U of Illinois p,1981),p.51.

59
of the late nineteenth century. She embodied the social ideals for which women of
that era were striving. She was individualistic, independent-minded, passionate,
courageous and brave. Edna was the definitive persona which thousands of women
during the late nineteenth century praised as a role model.This, combined with the
fact that Chopin was already an established author, seemed an indicator that The
Awakening was destined for success. One month before Chopin's novel was
published, an independent woman and critic named Lucy Monroe from Chicago
reviewed The Awakening for the March 1899 issue of Book News. Monroe's
review praises Chopin's work as a ''remarkable novel" and applauds it as "subtle
and brilliant kind of art".1 Monroe further depicts the novel as "so keen in its
analysis of character so subtle in its presentation of emotional effects that it seems
to reveal life as well as represent it''.2

After Herbert S.Stone and company published The Awakening on April 22,
1899, Chopin anxiously awaited the response of critics; unfortunately, while
Chopin anticipated a warm reception in the days following the novel's release,
critics were already sharpening their literary knives with which they would dissect
both the moral disposition of Edna Pontellier and the prurient theme of the novel. 3

That Chopin was already a successful and popular writer further fueled the
awkward consternation with which critics viewed The Awakening. In fact, because
of Chopin's success with her earlier works critics expected more of what Chopin
was known for as a regionalist writer. They expected to read a novel rich in
descriptive language, colorful characters, and the sights and sounds of Louisiana
Creole life. Instead of local color, however, critics were shocked and dismayed at

Edna Pontellier's behavior and considered Chopin's novel morbid and lacking
literary value. A lot of critics considered it immoral and dissolute. In the St. Louis

1. Emily Toth, Kate Chopin( New York: Morrow,1990),p.329.

2. Ibid., p.328.
3. Crystal Epps,''Kate Chopin's Liberated Women''(http;//www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/awakening/essay1.html)20-5-
2007,p.4.

60
Globe Democrat daily newspaper was published the article on The Awakening,“ It is
not a healthy book; if it points any particular moral or teaches any lesson, the fact
is not apparent. But there is no denying the fact that it deals with existent
conditions, and without attempting a solution, handles a problem that obtrudes
itself only too frequently in the social life of people with whom the question of food
and clothing is not the all absorbing one.”1 In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch city-wide
newspaper there were insulting words by journalist C. L. Deyo in 20 May 1899, “The
Awakening is not for the young person; not because the young person would be
harmed by reading it, but because the young person wouldn't understand it, and
everybody knows that the young person's understanding should be scrupulously
respected. It is for seasoned souls, for those who have lived, who have ripened
under the gracious or ungracious sun of experience and learned that realities do
not show themselves on the outside of things where they can be seen and heard,
weighed, measured and valued like the sugar of commerce, but treasured within
the heart, hidden away, never to be known perhaps save when exposed by
temptation or called out by occasions of great pith and moment. No, the book is
not for the young person, nor, indeed, for the old person who has no relish for
unpleasant truths. For such there is much that is very improper in it, not to say
positively unseemly. A fact, no matter how essential, which we have all agreed
shall not be acknowledged, is as good as no fact at all. And it is disturbing--even
indelicate--to mention it as something which, perhaps, does play an important part
in the life behind the mask.”2 The Dial magazine called The Awakening a
"poignant spiritual tragedy" with the caveat that the novel was "not altogether
wholesome in its tendencies."3 However Chopin did not pay attention to
unqualifiedly negative reviews.

The strongest critics couched their enmity towards the novel within a religious

1. http://people.virginia.edu/
2. Ibid
3. Ibid

61
and Biblical framework. Using words like "sin", "grace", "temptation", "unholy"
and "repent" to describe Edna's plight, critics stood united and inflexible in their
devotion to religious and moral conservatism.

For example, the May 13, 1899 edition of the St. Louis Globe Democrat daily
newspaper calls Edna's suicide "a prayer for deliverance from the evils that beset
her, all of her own creating".1 The June 4, 1899 edition of Literature says that
Edna "is one who has drifted from all right moorings, and has not the grace to
repent".2 Perhaps the most vehement objection to the novel's anti-religious
implications comes from the June 18, 1899 issue of the New Orleans Time
Democrat.Glaringly apparent in this review is the adamant and religious code
which prevailed during the late nineteenth century and the fastidiousness with
which critics strove to uphold it: “…The assumption that such a course as that
pursued by Edna has any sort of divine sanction cannot be too strongly protested
against. In a civilized society the right of the individual to indulge all his caprices
is, and must be, subject to many restrictive clauses, and it cannot for a moment
be admitted that a woman who has willingly accepted the love and devotion of a
man, even without equal love on her part who, has become his wife and the
mother of his children, has not incurred a moral obligation which peremptorily
forbids her from wantonly serving her relations with him, and entering openly
upon the independent existence of an unmarried woman.”3

As is apparent through the tone of this reviewer, puritan morality was, to a large
degree, responsible for much of the resistance against Chopin's novel. It was the
plumb line against which the value of Edna Pontellier,The Awakening, and Chopin
herself were evaluated.

The critic Lois K.Holland notes that in response to the religious and social
turbulence of the late nineteenth century: “Puritan morality became a rigid

1. Margaret Cully,ed.''The Awakening'';An Authoritative Text Context Criticism(New York; Nortorn,(1976), 146.
2. Ibid., pp.151-152.
3. Ibid., p.150
62
stronghold …imposing its repressive influence on artistic endeavors as well as on
practical aspects of life.1

In addition to religion, Puritan morality in the late nineteenth century also

showed itself in other ways. According to a professor of English at Louisiana State
University, Emily Toth, other novels of the time were successful because: “…all
were considered "healthy", with "kindly sentiment", suitable for a young person to
read; and all promote the traditional values that Kate Chopin, in The Awakening
had questioned.”2

In other words, literature in the late nineteenth century was deemed valuable
if it proved beneficial or appropriate for young people or if it contained a moral
lesson of some sort.What distressed critics was not that Chopin published a steamy
and controversial novel which was inappropriate for young people, for that type of
literature was available in plenty. Rather, what sparked their fury was that Chopin
was an established author and a respected member of the higher echelons of
society. Critics took offence that Chopin condoned (or at least did not condemn)
Edna's immoral behaviour. Holland notes that, " The awakening of a respectable
woman to her sensual nature might have been acceptable in 1899 if the author had
condemned her".3

Although Chopin appears to condemn Edna by selecting a method popular in the

nineteenth century literature to "punish" Edna, that of drowning, neither Edna nor
Chopin demonstrate any outward signs of remorse or shame at Edna's infidelity
and social deviance. A review in the June 25,1899 edition of the Los Angeles
Sunday Times says the following: “It is true that the woman in the book who
wanted her own way comes to an untimely end in the effort to get what she wants,
or rather, in the effort to gratify every whim that moves her capricious soul, Lois K.

1. Holland 'The Awakening''(http;// landofdystopia.com / 2006/12/Kate- Chopin-and her critics.html) 5-4-2007,p.7.

2. Emily Toth, Kate Chopin( New York: Morrow,1990),p.329.
3. Holland 'The Awakening''(http;// landofdystopia.com / 2006/12/Kate- Chopin-and her critics.html) 5-4-2007,p.8.

63
but there are sentences here and there throughout the book that indicate the
author's desire to hint her belief that her heroine had the right of the matter and
that if the woman had only been able to make other people "understand" things as
she did, she would not have had to drown herself in the blue waters of the
Maxican Gulf.1

Despite the difficult and changeable social atmosphere surrounding the

reception of Chopin's novel, many people in the United States, and especially the
media, were not ready in 1899 to face the social, religious, and moral implications
of The Awakening. However, if Chopin's novel were to have been published just
20 years later, when the women's movement experienced became active and
popular again in its the developments of a process, The Awakening might have
been met with overwhelming acceptance. But, as history notes, Chopin's novel
fell into relative obscurity after only a few short years.2

Ironically, the first to give life and popularity again to Chopin's work following
its banishment into obscurity was Daniel S.Rankin, a Roman Catholic priest. In
1932 he published Kate Chopin and her Creole stories, the first book – length
work on Chopin.3 Although editor Dorothy Anne Dandore praised Chopin two
years earlier saying that she "unveiled the tumults of a woman's soul", Rankin is
credited as the first serious revivalist of Chopin's work.4

After Rankin briefly brought back to popularity to the novel, The Awakening in
the 1930s, however it didn‘t became so famous. The spotlight of literary interest
wouldn't shine again on Chopin's work until 1953, when well-known translator
Cyrille Arnavon wrote a serious essay Les Debuts du Roman Realiste Ameicaine
et l’Influence Franscaise to introduce his translation of The Awakening into

1. Margaret Cully,ed. ''The Awakening'' ; An Authoritative Text Context Criticism (New York; Nortorn,(1976), 146.
2. Crystal Epps, ''Kate Chopin's Liberated Women'' (http;//www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/awakening/essay1.html)20-5-
2007,p.4.
3. Peggy Skaggs, Kate Chopin (Boston : Twayne Publishers,1985), p.5.
4. Ibid.

64
French. This again ignited a spark of interest in Chopin's work, but it was
extinguished almost immediately.1

In 1969, however, almost three-quarters of a century after The Awakening was

published in 1899 (and Chopin's subsequent death in 1904), Chopin's novel began
its hearty ascent into literary distinction. Per Seyersted one of Chopin's
biographers, published: Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography and The Complete
Works of Kate Chopin. Seyersted's books helped land the work of the late novelist
on the literary map. The literary community was ready, even hungry, to embrace
the theme that Chopin had so well expressed and effective in persuading
articulated seventy years earlier. What was held in the field of literature as amoral
and without value in 1899 was considered artistic and noble in 1969. 2

As Chopin's popularity spread like wildfire, her novel also served as

ammunition in the fight to bring insight and awareness to women's issues. Over the
past few decades the study of women writers has been characterized by:

“scholarship devoted to the discovery, republication, and reappraisal of ''lost'' or

undervalued writers and their work. From Rebecca Harding Davis and Kate
Chopin through Zora Neal Hurston and Mina Loy …reputations have been reborn
or remade and a female countercanon has come into being, out of components
that were large unavailable even a dozen years ago”3

Since the resurrection of Chopin's novel in 1969, countless classrooms across the
United States have found in The Awakening a superb example of the transcendent
New Woman. A professor emeritus of English at Mansfield University in
Pennsylvania Bernard Koloski, in the preface of his anthology, notes that The
Awakening has become ''one of the most often taught of all American novels''.4

1. Peggy Skaggs, Kate Chopin (Boston : Twayne Publishers,1985),. p.6.

2. David H. Richter,ed. Falling int Theory; Conflicting Views on Reading Literature (Boston :Bedford, 1994), p.16.
3. Lillian Robinson, '' Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon''(http:// www.dreamessays.com/Kate % Chopin /2240.htm) 5-2-
2007,p.15.
4. Ibid.

65
 A compilation of teaching approaches to Chopin's novel, Koloski's anthology

reflects the versatility of the novel in terms of literary study. He notes that Kate
Chopin and the recent re-emergence of The Awakening have helped: “ satisfy

Americans' suddenly discovered hunger for a classic woman writer who addresses
some of contemporary women's concerns.1

From analyzing historical and cultural background of The Awakening we can

say that Kate Chopin was one of primary feminist writers who dared to write about
women‘s problem. At firstly this novel wasn‘t accepted by critics, readers and
media however the beginning feminist movements revived this novel and made
it as an example of New Woman.

§3. Women problems for identity in Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening.

When we analyzed the historical and cultural backgrounds of The Awakening

we did researches on the history of this novel and now we are going to analyze this
novel as women problem‘s for identity.

The Awakening is the story of one woman's struggle for self–identity. Edna
Pontellier is a twenty eight year old wife and mother of two children. Her husband,
Leonce, is a successful New Orleans businessman with conventional expectations
of his wife. The family summers at Grand Isle, a vacation resort on the Gulf. It is
here that Edna begins her awakening. In addition to Edna, the novel centers on two
other female characters. Mme. Ratignolle represents the quintessential mother –
woman figure that society recognizes and applauds. Her world centers on her
husband and children and outwardly she sacrifices everything for them. However,
she uses her children to call attention to herself, possibly trying to define her
existence through them. Edna pointedly turns away from this picture of woman

1. Bernard Koloski,ed. ''Preface'',Approaches to Teaching Choipn's ''The Awakening''(New York: MLA,1988),p.ix.

66
and sees another side. Mlle. Reisz is a female artist, a musician who is quite
talented, although no one but Edna can see this. She is not beautiful and is
despised by all that know her reputation. Her personality insures solitude. Edna
finds this picture frightening also as she sees what society can do to those who are
seeking a life outside the norm.1

Edna's search for self-identity begins at Grand Isle where she is first attracted
to Robert Lebrun. The two of them go swimming and she is both afraid and
exhilarated by her feelings and not quite ready for the consciousness this swim
initiates. As time passes, she is more aware of her physical body and her desires.
She puts aside her obligations one by one, letting everyday responsibilities drop
from her shoulders as she seeks an independence and freedom usually reserved for
men. She is now able to see herself more clearly as an individual. She can no
longer conform to an empty role or half–hearted attempt at life. When Robert
goes away, she eventually has an affair with Alcee, an attractive young man of
questionable character. Edna finds, in the end, that she wants to be possessed by no
man but is able to give herself freely when and to whom she pleases. 2 She realizes
society's denial of this course of action and her attachment to her children.
Therefore, in an attempt to exert her free will and independence, she goes back to
Grand Isle, takes off her clothes, and swims out into the Gulf.3

Edna Pontellier rebels against the social constructs that confine her,
especially the notion of "true womanhood", in which women were supposed to be
docile, domestic creatures, whose main concerns in life were to be the raising of
their children and submissiveness to their husbands. 4 Edna tells Robert: “ I
suppose this is what you would call unwomanly; but I have got into the habit of
expressing my – self. It doesn't matter to me, and you may think me unwomanly if

1. Harold Bloom , Kate Chopin ( New York: Chelsea House Publishers,1987), p.11.
2. Ibid
3. Lynda S. Boron and Sara Desaussure Davis, Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou ( Baton Rouge : Louisiana State
UP,1992),p.194.
4. Joyce Dyer, ''The Awakening'': ANovel of Beginning(New York : Twayne,1993),p.32.

67
 you like.” 1

This outburst tells us how Edna predicts the society around her will react to her
ability, and need to express her feelings, and relate her thoughts to others. The
opinions of others are of little concern to Edna. She refuses to change herself in
order to fit into the restrictive mould that society has created for her. The novel is
an account of Edna's rite de passage, her movement out of ignorance into
knowledge, the account of her quest to discover self; the moment when she begins
to loosen and unfetter all her repressed desires.2

Edna, even, neglects her children throughout the novel. She sees them as an
obstacle to her freedom, feels ''relief'' when they are away and irresponsibly leaves
them in the care of the pregnant Madam Ratignolle so that she can be with
Robert. She almost seems to have an "out of sight, out of mind" attitude when it
comes to her children. In a significant conversation with her friend Adele
Ratignolle, Edna declares: “ I would give up the unessential; I would give my
money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself .I can't
make it more clear; it is only something which I'm beginning to comprehend ,
which is revealing itself to me.”

Edna is unwilling to give up her individuality for her children, although she
would give her life for them.3she finds it difficult to express how she feels about
this; she seems unable to put her finger on it.4

Emma Jones believes that the figure of Edna Pontellier marks a departure
from the female characters of earlier nineteenth-century American novels , such as
the character of Hester Prynne, of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter ,Cora

1. Kate Chopin, The Awakening(Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972),P.117.

2. Unregistered,''The Development of Edna Pontellier's Character'' (http://www.gradsaver: com/classicnotes/titles/awakening/essay
3.html) 4-5-2007, p.5.
3. Unregistered,''The Development of Edna Pontellier's Character'' (http://www.gradsaver: com/classicnotes/titles/awakening/essay
3.html) 4-5-2007, p.7.

68
Munro from James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans , and the
unnamed protagonist ( and narrator) of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow
Wallpaper.1

It is interesting to compare the character of Edna with that of Cora Munro,

from The Last of the Mohicans. Cora is the elder sister of Alice, and the voice of
reason and strength. She is one of the most admirable characters, with a mothering,
selfless nature that cares only to keep her sister safe. Cora's relationship with Alice
demonstrates a distinct mother-daughter pattern that manifests itself in every
interaction between the two women. When Alice shows doubt and fear, Cora
immediately rushes to protect and soothe her.2

Cooper writes: ―for many moments the elder sister looked upon the younger, with
a countenance that wavered with powerful and contending emotions. At length she
spoke, though her tones had lost their rich and calm fullness, in an expression of
tenderness that seemed maternal.3

Her motherly feelings towards Alice verge on the saintly; Cora often rises
above common human sensibility that takes on the role of a martyr in the manner
that a mother would for her child. Edna, on the other hand, is not satisfied with
devoting her life to her husband and children. She cares more for her needs to be
her own person, Edna, a woman, instead of merely a mother or wife.

Somewhere in between these two extremes lies the character of Hester

Prynne,the protagonist of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Hester, an
adulterous woman who is punished for her "crime" by being made to wear a scarlet
letter 'A' on her bosom, harboured an intense love for her child Pearl although the
child's mischievous and imp-like qualities brought nothing but pain to her mother.

1. Emma Jones, “A Study of Edna’s charecter‖?(www.dreamessays\ Kate %20 Chopin /2330.htm)7-6-2007,p.4.)

2. Emma Jones, ''A Study of Edna's Character'' (http://www.dreamessays/ Kate %20 Chopin /2330.htm)7-6-2007,p.5.
3. James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans(Oxford Word's Classics,1988),p.124.

69
She wanted only the absolute best for Pearl. Also Hester was simply astounded
and horrified at the idea of Pearl being taken away from her when this question
was brought to the governor.1 This is demonstrated in the lines: "Speak thou for
me" cried she. ''Thou wast my pastor, and hadst charge of my soul, and
knowest me better than these men can. I will not lose the child! Speak
for me! Thou knowest, for thou hast sympathies which these men lack!,
thou knowest what is in my heart, and what are a mother's rights, and
how much the stronger they are, when the mother has put her child and the
scarlet letter, look thou to it ! I will not lose the child! Look to it!”2

Hester, like Edna, believed that society needed to change its attitude towards
women, and their role in that society. The difference between the two women was
that Hester felt that she had something to lose, and if she voiced these ideas, her
precious child, Pearl, would be taken away from her. Edna, however, felt so
strongly about the injustices within her society that it became a stronger force than
her love for her children.3

In the early chapters, Edna is referred to only as Mrs. Pontellier, as a subset of

Mr. Pontellier. At this point, Edna's sense of self is still defined in terms of her
connection with her husband, Leonce. At the time, but at another level, Edna as a
fictional character has not yet materialized from the text. A few pages after making
her entrance, Mrs. Pontellier fights with Mr. Pontellier and finds what Chopin
describes as: … an indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some
unfamiliar part of her consciousness, and filled her whole being with a vague
anguish.4

On account of her still undelineated character and primordial sense of self, Mrs.
Pontellier's suffering is appropriately ''indescribable'', ''unfamiliar'', and ''vague''.

1. Emma Jones, “A Study of Edna’s charecter” (www.dreamessays\)

2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York:Chelsea House Publisher, 1982),p.113
3. Emma Jones, “A Study of Edna’s charecter” (www.dreamessays\)
4. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972), (A:p.49)

70
 But in this unformed self, Edna is beginning to: “ realize her position in
the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to
the world within and about her.1

In perceiving the world around her, Mrs.Pontellier's self is emerging from

her non-self. Symbolically, Edna's sense of self is accompanied by the voice
of sea, which is: seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring
inviting to soul to wonder for a spell in abysses of solititude; to lose itself in
mazes of inward contemplation.2

And it is by the sea that Kate Chopin first pulls Edna out from the narrative
and gives her an ego by referring to her by her given name and, after
__
walking through a sea of grass, recounts Edna's previous love interests
the cavalry officer, a young gentleman, and the tragedian. In other words,
Edna's self is born here by "inward contemplation", with the aid of the
"seductive odor" and "sonorous murmur" of the sea and its "loving but
imperative entreaty''3. The objects of her previous attachments were
men, or perhaps her desire for the men of her past. In Edna's present lifetime
on Grand Isle, her attachment is to Robert Lebrun, who draws Edna's ego to
its fullest from Chopin's narrative and makes Edna's suffering more intense
and tangible.4

Shortly after the reader meets Robert Lebrun and realizes that Edna
is strangely drawn to the young man, the seed of Edna's attachment is thus planted,
Chopin prepares a series of events that expands Edna's senses and makes her fully
aware of herself. Edna begins to feel things more intensely. In listening
to Mademosielle Reisz's music, Edna no longer simply detachedly sees pictures

1. Kate Chopin, The Awakening(Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972)(A:p.57 )

2. Ibid (A:p.57)
3. Ibid (A:Ibid.)
4. Ibid (A: p.50)
5. Andrew Delbanco ,''The Half Life of Edna Pontellier'', New Essays on ''The Awakening'', ed. Wendy Martin,(Cambridge:Cambridge
UP,1988),p.89.

71
of feelings but experiences them intensely. The very waves daily beat upon her
splendid body … perhaps it was not the first time she was ready, perhaps the first
time her being was tempered to take an impress of the abiding truth.1

While Mademoiselle Reisz's music is still playing, the voice of the sea can be
heard and its shore is within easy reach. In this second key event, under a
moonlight night, with the moon's '' mystic shimmer… casting a million lights
across the distant, restless water 2'' , takes Edna for a swim in the ocean, baptizing
her selfhood. It is somehow appropriate that Robert, the object of Edna's
attachment, should propose ''a bath at that mystic hour and under that mystic
moon 3''. In this pivotal chapter Edna has a physical, a bodily epiphany; she
suddenly knows how to swim. However, the epiphany carries little weight in
Edna's inner mental working. Chopin does not spend time telling the reader what
Edna realizes about her position in society or in universe. 4 This mastery over her
physical self gives Edna: ― a sense of exultation …, as if some power of significant
import had been given her to control the working of her body and soul .She grew
daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out ,
where no woman had swum before.‖ 5

As Edna's fortified ego emerges ashore, her attachment to Robert is

strengthened. The intimate moment they share at the end of the chapter bespeaks
an ''acme of bliss'', where: no multitude of words could have been more
significant than those moments of silence, or more pregnant with the first-felt
throbbings of desire.6

After Edna's rebirth from the sea, her sense of self blossoms. She pulls away

1. Kate Chopin, The Awakening(Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A:pp.71-72)

2. Ibid(A: p.70)
3. Andrew Delbanco ,''The Half Life of Edna Pontellier'', New Essays on ''The Awakening'', ed. Wendy Martin,(Cambridge:Cambridge
UP,1988), p.90..
4. Kate Chopin, The Awakening(Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A:pp.73-74)
5. Ibid (A:p.77)
6. Andrew Delbanco ,''The Half Life of Edna Pontellier'', New Essays on ''The Awakening'', ed. Wendy Martin,(Cambridge:Cambridge
UP,1988),p.89.

72
from the crowd and begins to do as she pleases. Leonce Pontellier's stern
command to her to come inside after the swim goes unheeded. Edna realizes that
her will has '' blazed up, stubborn and resistant''. Edna's recognition of her will is
fully formed.1 Chopin further describes Edna as: “… blindly following whatever
impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction and
freed her soul of responsibility.”2 The otherness of the people on Grand Isle
becomes sharply defined against Edna's new vigor. Even Robert, the object of her
attachment, becomes an other. When Robert claims to understand her fatigue,
Edna lashes out: “ You don't know anything about it. Why should you know?
I never was so exhausted in my life.”3

Othering Robert, therefore objectifying him, gives rise to Edna's desire to

possess him, creating suffering when the inevitable truth comes that one can not
ever possess another, because there is nothing to possess.4

In the subsequent chapter, Edna and Robert spend some quality time on
Cheniere Caminada.This is an ego affirming experience for Edna, setting her up
for her fall. The chapter is sensually written, continuing Edna's discovery of her
sensual self in the ocean. Edna notices that ''fine, firm quality and texture of her
flash'' 5 and eats her lunch with a healthy appetite, tearing into a piece of

bread with her ''strong, white teeth'' 6. The fact that the couple travel by boat to the
__
shore of Cheniere Caminada suggests a dream like journey in which Edna is
transported to a distant shore, another life where she and Robert can experience
another "acme of bliss".7

1. Andrew Delbanco ,''The Half Life of Edna Pontellier'', New Essays on ''The Awakening'', ed. Wendy Martin,(Cambridge:Cambridge
UP,1988), Ibid.,p.82.
2. Kate Chopin, The Awakening(Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A:p.79)
3. Ibid(A: p.75)
4. Andrew Delbanco ,''The Half Life of Edna Pontellier'', New Essays on ''The Awakening'', ed. Wendy Martin,(Cambridge:Cambridge
UP,1988), Ibid.,p.85.
5. Kate Chopin, The Awakening(Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A: p.84)
6. Ibid(A: p.85)
7. Ibid.

73
 But something happens when Edna wakens from the Cheniere Caminada
dream. Chopin tells us that Edna realizes that "she herself, her present life, was in
some way different from the other self ''.1 Here is a hint of recognition of the
transient nature of the self. Chopin goes on to say that: “ Edna was seeing with
different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that
colored and changed her environment, she did not yet suspect.”2 Although Edna
herself does not see it clearly, Chopin is pointing out that Edna's sense of self is
changing again. Edna's subtle realization in this chapter is presented quickly,
almost carelessly, but it has planted a seed. The movement of the novel from this
point on is toward Edna's fuller realization of the impermanence of the self. 3

The catalyst that accelerates the flowering of the seed is Robert's physical
departure from Edna's life. At this point in the novel, Edna's sense of self is so
bound up with Robert's presence that once he leaves, she has to build her ego back
up again. At the dinner when Edna learns about Robert's impending trip to Mexico,
Robert's voice reminds her "of some gentleman on the stage''4, a recognition of a
previous life. Here Edna begins to recognize "the symptoms of [her] infatuation''.
However, the "recognition did not lessen the reality, the poignancy of the
revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability" 5. Chopin goes on to
describe Edna's Pontellier's revelation: “ The past was nothing to her; offered no
lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never
attempted to penetrate.The present alone was significant; was hers, to torture her
as it was doing then with the biting conviction that she had lost that which she had
held, that she had been denied that which her impassioned, newly awakened being
demanded.” 6

1. Kate Chopin, The Awakening(Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A: p.88).
2. Ibid(A:p.89)
3. Erin E. MacDonald ,''Kate Chopin's Gender- Awakening'' (http://w ww.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddss/macdonald.htm) 6-3-
2007,p.2.
4. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A:p.90)
5. Ibid (A: p.94)
6. Ibid (A:p.94)

74
 After some stagnation in the sensual realms, the shock of Robert's going away
is too great for Edna to move ahead. Her problem is that she can not recapture the
sense of self she felt when Robert's physical presence was there to motivate her.
Consequently, Edna becomes obsessive about the memory of Robert. She looks at
pictures of Robert, as a baby, at age five, as a teen, etc., but which one is the real
Robert? Edna can not find a "recent picture of Robert, none which suggested the
Robert who had gone away …, leaving a void and wilderness behind him" 1.
Because the physical form changes,Edna can never find the "essential "Robert.
While this illustrates the impermanence of self, Edna does not see the futility of
her quest.2

Nevertheless, this is still an awakening of sorts for Edna. It differs from the
swimming awakening in that the latter was achieved through an exploration of
Edna's physical self. The second awakening, which never fully materializes, is a
result of an agitation of Edna's mental self. The focus of her attachment is still
Robert, though now it becomes a mental process.3

The mental exploration of Edna's self is to be conducted on land, with Edna

traversing New Orleans's landscape. Spatially, Chopin moves Edna inland, away
from Grand Isle. After Edna moves back into the city, it is difficult to say what is
sustaining her sense of self. "She began to do as she liked and to feel as she
liked"4. Occasionally she thinks about Robert and "could hear again the ripple of
the water, the flapping sail'' 5. She is sometimes happy, sometimes unhappy. She is
described by the other characters as suddenly capricious and apt to act on fancy.

1. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A:p.95)
2. Erin E. MacDonald ,''Kate Chopin's Gender- Awakening'' (http://w ww.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddss/macdonald.htm)6-3-
2007,p.3.
3. Ibid.,p.5.
4. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A: p.109)
5. Ibid (A:p.109)

75
She is prone to days of depression, ''when life appeared to her like a grotesque
pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly towards inevitable
annihilation''1.

It seems that Edna is in limbo. On her unhappy days, Edna's sense of self
seems to shrink into a kind of basic animal nature. But sometimes there are echoes
of Edna's knowledge of the self she knew in the Grand Isle days. We see one of
these flashes when Edna goes to visit Robert's mother, Madam Lebrun, whose
house "from the outside looked like a prison".2Edna refuses to enter the prison –
like house, refusing to imprison herself in memories of Robert and the walls in
which he grew into the Robert she knew.3 But she realizes that she is still : “ under
the spell of her infatuation…[T]he thought of him was like an obsession,
everpressing itself upon her…[I]t was his being, his existence, which dominated
her thought , fading sometimes as if it would melt into the mist of the forgotten,
reviving again with an intensity which filled her with an incomprehensible
longing.”4

Her tie with Robert is maintained by her association with the community from
Grand Isle: Madame Ratignolle and her soirees, musicales, Mademoiselle Reiz and

her music, and most immediately, Robert's letters. These people help her keep

thoughts of Robert alive. Her sense of self is still largely defined by her sensual
self and reinforced by her contacts with Grand Isle community, but it is no longer
opulently sensuous. Robert isn't there to provide the lushness to her ego and her
existence, but her memories of him signal a melancholy reminder of
impermanence that she is not yet consciously acknowledging.

1. Erin E. MacDonald ,''Kate Chopin's Gender- Awakening'' (http://w ww.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddss/macdonald.htm)6-3-

2007,
2. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A: p.110).
3. Erin E. MacDonald ,''Kate Chopin's Gender- Awakening''(http://w ww.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddss/macdonald.htm)6-3-
2007,p.3.
4. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A: p.105)

76
Here sadness is another defining emotion that solidifies attachment and reinforces
herself. Through this sadness Edna begins to transcend her attachment to Robert.

The more Edna indulges in her sensual self, the more she feels Robert's
absence. However, often her longing for Robert's absence is coupled with feeling
of emptiness.1 This can be seen at the last party she gives at the Pontellier's house:

“There came over her the acute longing which always summoned into her
spiritual vision the presence of the beloved one, overpowering her at once with
a sense of the unattainable.” 2

Edna's sexual need for Robert undermines her autonomy because it

only furthers the teachings of her upbringing, which have told her that woman
is dependent on man and can not be happy without him. ''We shall be
everything to each other'', she tells him. Although the heroine attempts
__
to use her self proclaimed sexual independence in order to achieve
mental independence, she fails. Letting her freed sensibility run wild,
she ''becomes ensared by romantic love''.3 Neither the romantic nor the domestic
traditions work for the New Woman, and she fails to find a middle ground that
would give her the strength she needs. Instead she falls into an aimless depression,
caught between cultural and emotional limitations. Edna not yet prepared to risk a
romantic

attachment in favour of autonomy, represents the bridge between the passive,

dutiful wife and the more aggressive, independent woman. 4

She mistakenly associates her growing sexual awareness with a new __ found

1. Erin E. MacDonald ,''Kate Chopin's Gender- Awakening'' (http://w ww.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddss/macdonald.htm)6-3-

2007,p.7.
2. Kate Chopin, The Awakening (Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A:p.145)
3. Wendy Martin ed., New Essays on ''The Awakening'' ( Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1988) p.23.
4. Ibid.,p.24

77
personal liberation. Although her desire leads her to separate from her controlling
husband, it misses the point. Chopin's story implies that Edna needs to become
__
more significantly independent of men and to adjust to being self reliant, before
she can have a successful and fulfilling love relationship. Her senses are awakened
by Robert, and she begins to break with some society conventions, but she is still
consumed by a romantic need for a bond with a man. Life with Robert would be
passionate, at least, but still domestic. At Madame Antoine's house on the Island,
Robert 'was childishly gratified to discover her appetite, and to see the relish with
which she ate the food which he had procured for her''1. The food that Edna eats
with such vigour has not been obtained by her own hands; she is still passive,
acting only in blind obedience to her sensual impulses. After learning of Robert's
imminent trip to Mexico, she ''laid her spoon down and looked about her
bewildered'' 2.At the first sign of his leaving, all her new confidence is gone. In
__
Robert's absence, she becomes despondent and depressed, not self sufficient and
independently content: “ What dominates her imagination during this period

is not so much a feminist revolt as the idea of transcendent passion for Robert of
the kind suggested by romantic literature ; and not seeking help from any source ,
external or internal, to check it, she dreams about such a love, leading herself to

any impulse as if freed of all responsibility”.3

With the purpose of her own life determined solely by her relationship to a man,
her rebellion against traditional gender roles becomes less positive action
toward women's emancipation than a passive backward fall into the arms of
romantic sensibility.4

After Robert's departure, Edna makes another relationship with another man,
1.
Kate Chopin, The Awakening(Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A: p.60)
2.
Ibid (A: p.83)
3. Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Baton Rougue: Louisiana State UP ,1969),p.141.
4. Per Seyersted, Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (Baton Rougue: Louisiana State UP ,1969),p.148.

78
Alcee Arobin. Her sexual relationship with Alcee Arobin also throws her back into
the role of object. Overtaken by the fever of physical passion, Edna is in danger
once again of losing her independence. She gives herself to Alcee with careless
disregard, not having taken the time to think of any possible consequences to
herself: “ Alcee Arobin was absolutely nothing to her. Yet his presence, his
manners, the warmth of his glances, and above all the touch of his lips upon her
hand had acted like a narcotic upon her.”1

She is too ''drugged'' to fully take control of her life, and seems to be giving
it over instead to a different, yet parallel, form of entrapment, since her
thoughts and reactions are too unclear to provide any positive direction for
her future. She tells Arobin: “ one of these days …I'm going to pull myself
together for a while and think …try to determine what character of woman
I am, for, candidly,Idon't know.”2

An American critic and Professor Andrew Dalbanco writes: “Alcee Arobin

(who becomes Edna’s lover), Edna knows, is nothing more than a measure of her
desperation to find an antidote to numbness.”3

After her first sexual encounter with Arobin, she can not truly accept what she
professes to believe, that she can handle sex without love. Although Chopin tells
us Edna feels no shame: “ There was a dull pang of regret because it was not the
kiss of love which had inflamed her ,because it was not love which had held this
cup of life to her lips.” 4

She seems to be choosing solitary freedom, but it is bound to her romantic

desire for oneness with a man. An American critic and feminist Elaine
Showalter agrees: “Although her affair with Arobin shocks her into awareness

1. Kate Chopin, The Awakening(Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A:p.98)

2. Ibid (A:P.102 )
3. Andrew Delbanco ,''The Half Life of Edna Pontellier'', New Essays on ''The Awakening'', ed. Wendy Martin,(Cambridge:Cambridge
UP,1988), Ibid.,p.85.
4. Kate Chopin, The Awakening(Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A:p.108)

79
of her own sexual passions, it leaves her illusions about love intact.”1

A well-known critic and essayist Stephanie Trunzo believes that:“Edna

does not really fall in love with anyone and in the end she realizes that she never
will. Edna, miserable, with her awakening, repeats to herself, ''To-day it is Arobin;
tomorrow it will be someone else''.

Trunzo examines the striking similarities between Schopenhauer's philosophy

in ''The World as Will and Representation'' and Chopin's study of Edna Pontillier
in The Awakening, looking particularly at the cycle of desire and salvation in the
arts, he thinks that: “ Chopin, a well-educated and well-read woman, wrote her
novel in 1899 so it would be not unlikely to imagine that she might have read or
been influenced by Schopenhauer's work published decades before; however,
Schopenhauer's philosophy would be lent more credibility had Chopin created
Edna without previous knowledge of his work because Edna could then stand as
an example of how life really is and still fit perfectly with Schopenhauer's
descriptions”.2

Schopenhauer believes that all love is sexual love. There is yet another desire,
this time for another person, that cries to be fulfilled. Edna's entire relationship
with Arobin is physical and even the relationship she creates in her mind with
Robert is based on desire.3

The love that Schopenhauer describes as truest comes from a mutual

recognition of each other's plight as humans. There is a certain perceived unity in
the combining of two wills through love. Schopenhauer believes it is also through
the creation of children that two people in love can physically see their two wills

1. Elain Showalter ed., The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women ,Literature and Theory (New York: Pantheon,1985),p.33

2. StephanieTrunzo, ''Chopin and Schopenhauer:similar philosophies'' (http://feminism.eserver.org/discourse/Chopin.html)3-2-

2007,p.1.

3. Ibid., p.5.

80
combined into one.1 Madame Ratignolle loves her children with all her heart and
includes them in the domestic happiness she feels. Edna, though the mother of two
children, relates to them oddly.2 Edna would ''sometimes gather them passionately
to her heart; she would sometimes forget them'' 3. Adelle Ratignolle, attempts to
bring Edna back, ''think of the children, Edna .Oh think of the children! Remember
them!''4 Madame Ratignole, whose mundane existence demands that she places
children as woman's ultimate earthly attachment, does not realize that Edna has
moved beyond this point. But Edna would not give up herself for them: “ I would
give up the unessential, my money, I would give my life for my children ; but I
wouldn't give myself.”5

Madame Ratignolle had replied: “ I don't know what you call essential, or what
you mean by the unessential…but a woman who would give her life for her
children could do no more than that.”6

For Adele, ''life'' and ''self'' are synonymous, therefore both essential. Edna,
on the other hand, clearly separates ''life'' and ''self''; Edna considers her life and
her money unessential, but it is not clear whether she considers her children
essential. 7

In order to break the monotony of her life, Edna turns to the art which is the
only thing Schopenhauer lists as above the cycle of desire. Art and music alleviate
the pain of life and remove the personal pain from the senses. The arts provide an
unbiased vehicle for the senses.8 The arts answer in some sense the question which

1. StephanieTrunzo,''Chopin and Schopenhauer:similar philosophies'' (http://feminism.eserver.org/discourse/Chopin.html)3-2-

2007,p.2.
2. Susan J. Rosowski,''The Awakening as a Prototype of the Novel of Awakening in Women's Experience''(http://www.women
writers. net/domesticgoddess/lv.html)20-5-2007,p.3.
3. Kate Chopin, The Awakening(Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A: p.37)
4. Ibid (A: p.40)
5. Ibid (A: p.70)
6. Ibid (A: p.71)
7. Susan J. Rosowski,''The Awakening as a Prototype of the Novel of Awakening in Women's Experience''(http://www.women
writers. net/domesticgoddess/lv.html)20-5-2007,p.3.
8. StephanieTrunzo,''Chopin and Schopenhauer:similar philosophies'' (http://feminism.eserver.org/discourse/Chopin.html)3-2-2007

81
humans do not allow themselves to look at directly, ''what is life?' As a human, it is
natural to seek truth: “ For in every mind that which once gives itself up to
the purely objective contemplation of the world, a desire has been awakened,
however concealed and unconscious, to comprehend the true nature of things, of
life, and of existence …the result of every purely objective, and so every artistic,
apprehension of things is an expression more of the true nature life and of
existence”.1

This is the truth that Edna finds herself seeking in Madame Reiz's musical
talent. When Edna is in a mood that life is not worth living, she ventures to Reisz's
home where ''new voices woke in her'' 2 during Reisz's playing. She then becomes
a regular visitor. Each time ''the music penetrated her whole being like effulgence,
warming and brightening the dark places of her soul'' 3.

Music is not the only art form with which Edna is involved; Edna also draws
comfort from her own drawing and painting. In fact, Edna eventually abandons
everything else in order to keep up her paintings. she feels in her sketching ''a
satisfaction of a kind which no other employment afforded her '' 4. She begins by
tracing her friend, Madame Ratignoll; however, she finds her work imperfect and
destroys it. Every one thinks it a fine piece of work coming ''from a natural
aptitude'' 5. In the midst of her awakening, she returns to her artwork and goes over
her old sketches; ''she could see their shortcomings and defects, which were
glaring in her eyes''6. This amount of reflection upon one's own work is a mistake
according to Schopenhauer.7The truest pieces of art are those created out of : “ the
pure work of the rapture of the moment, of the inspiration, of the free impulse of

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Represntation (New York : Dover Publications,1958),p.406.
2. Kate Chopin, The Awakening(Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A: p44)
3. Ibid (A: p.101)
4. Ibid (A:p.30)
5. Ibid.
6. Kate Chopin, The Awakening(Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A: p.75)
7. StephanieTrunzo,''Chopin and Schopenhauer:similar philosophies'' (http://feminism.eserver.org/discourse/Chopin.html)3-2-
2007,p.2.

82
the genius, without any admixture of deliberation and reflection.”1

When Edna does finally turn to her painting and abandons all else, she sets at it
with a fever and a decisiveness that Schopenhauer would frown upon. Although
she does gain a certain amount of respect for inspiration and explains her behavior
to her husband by saying, ''I feel like painting… Perhaps I shan't always feel like
it, ''2 she remains caught up in her capricious search for happiness. Edna tells her
musical friend, Madame Reisz, ''I am becoming an artist'' to which Madame Reisz
laughs and replies ''… the artist must possess the courageous soul … the soul that
dares and defies''3. Schopenhauer would surely agree as he feels that ''an
arbitrary playing with the means of art without proper knowledge of the end is in
every art the fundamental characteristic of bungling''.4 Perhaps this is the reason
that Edna can only derive so much comfort from her art , yet it is still not enough.

Edna was observed to have a talent for art; however, it is in genius and not
talent that truth is found.5 Schopenhauer makes the distinction between talent and
genius by saying: “ Talent is a merit to be found in the greater versatility and
acuteness of discursive rather than of intuitive knowledge. The person endowed
with talent thinks more rapidly and accurately than do the rest; on the other hand
, the genius perceives a world different from them all, though only by looking
more deeply into the world that lies before them also, since it represents itself in
his mind more objectively, consequently more purely and distinctly.”6

Because Edna possessed talent and not genius, she could never be satisfied or
find the whole truth in her art. As it is art only that provides a fleeting moment of
truth and never the whole picture.7

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Represntation (New York : Dover Publications,1958),p.409.
2. Kate Chopin, The Awakening(Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A: p.77)
3. Ibid (A:p.88)
4. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Represntation (New York : Dover Publications,1958),p.408.
5. StephanieTrunzo,''Chopin and Schopenhauer:similar philosophies'' (http://feminism.eserver.org/discourse/Chopin.html)3-2-2007,p.2.
6. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Represntation (New York : Dover Publications,1958), p.376.
7. StephanieTrunzo,''Chopin and Schopenhauer:similar philosophies'' (http://feminism.eserver.org/discourse/Chopin.html)3-2-
2007,p.2.p.5.

83
 __
Edna then still sees her life as the never ending chain of desires
that Schopenhauer describes despite the brief reprieves art offers. According to
Schopenhauer, happiness is like an illusion matched with distance. 1 Things look
brighter with promise and hope and are remembered more fondly with the passing
of time; ''consequently, the present is always inadequate, but the future is
uncertain, and the past is irrecoverable''.2 Edna matches this pattern by recalling
her cycle of infatuations as time of happiness that are impossible to bring back.
Edna also refers to a memory of running through tall grass several times,
remembering it with the fondness reserved for a happy past. Edna counts on
happiness in her future too, by constantly daydreaming and creating visions of
alternative realities in mind that will never come true. As soon as her love affairs
with Arobin and Robert come close to becoming realities, Edna realizes that they
do not bring the happiness she thinks they will.3

Due to Edna's increasingly strange habits, her husband begins to wonder at her
sanity. Schopenhauer defines madness as an abnormality of memory. People
become muddled with recollections, unsure of whether the things in their mind or
memory actually occurred. Edna dwells in her memories and at times is confused
by what she recounts. At one point, Edna tells her company a story with an air of
fact; however, every word is fictitious. Though it could have been a dream Edna
once had and now related, the champagne's ''subtle fumes played fantastic tricks
with Edna's memory that night''4and ''every glowing word seemed real to those
who listened'' 5.

Another symptom Schopenhauer ascribes to madness is obsessive longing to

which Edna surely is party.6

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Represntation (New York : Dover Publications,1958),p.376.
2. Ibid. p.6.
3. Ibid. p.57
4. StephanieTrunzo,''Chopin and Schopenhauer:similar philosophies'' (http://feminism.eserver.org/discourse/Chopin.html)3-2-
2007,p.2., p.7.
5. Kate Chopin, The Awakening(Louisiana State University :Baton Rouge,1972) (A:p.91)
6. (Ibid.)
84
This casting out of mind occurs when a person keeps constantly present to his
mind, and can not rid off, the cause of his insanity … in the case of many who
have gone mad from love …where the cause is constantly longed for. 1

Edna, all the while that Robert is gone, can not keep him from her mind.
Although she later realizes that she does not really love Robert, she believes she
does at the time and becomes obsessed with it.2

Being in a state of boredom quite often, Edna has much time to ponder the
things that trouble her. The lack of genuine love in Edna's life contributes to her
uncertain madness. Schopenhauer believes that longing for love can reach such
intensity of this desire that nothing in the world or even life itself matters next to
that desire.3 The intensity of this desire and constant longing for love can: ― make
a person ready for any sacrifice, and, if its fulfillment remains for ever denied, can
lead to madness or suicide … when a human is in a state of extreme physical pain,
nothing else matters except alleviation of the pain__even if that means death… In
cases of great spiritual pain, in fact, physical pain is even a temporary, welcome
distraction.4

Would suicide not then be the ultimate distraction? Edna pieces together the
connection between physical pain and the interval in her spiritual suffering. She,
then, is forced by her emotions and swims out beyond the point where she is
physically able to return.5

George Spangler addresses the issue from a different perspective, not why
she killed herself but would she have? He thinks that the action was inconsistent
and inappropriate. He believes that after Edna overcame so much, demonstrated
such strength of will and determination, she would not let something like Robert's

1. Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms( New York:Penguin Books , 1983),essay78.

2. StephanieTrunzo,''Chopin and Schopenhauer:similar philosophies'' (http://feminism.eserver.org/discourse/Chopin.html), p.6.
3. Ibid.
4. Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, ( New York:Penguin Books , 1983),essay79.
5. StephanieTrunzo,''Chopin and Schopenhauer:similar philosophies'' (http://feminism.eserver.org/discourse/Chopin.html) p.7.

85
incomprehension of her advances push her into a state of suicidal despair.1
Portals takes issue with Spangler and points out the very undetermined nature of
Edna's personality. He maintains that the suicide is not surprising and is in keeping
with Edna's desire not to think of the consequences of her actions or about her
future. Portals contends that Edna's suicide is a result of her desire not to think of
the consequences because those consequences are so unattractive.

“Edna chooses to live self-forgetfully in the moment. In following this

unexpressed creed, Edna knowingly places herself in a position where the
consequences of her swimming out are inescapable; her final act simply cannot be
obviated.”2 Professor Helen Emmitt approaches Edna's death from a male-female
point of view. She believes that women commit suicide, especially by drowning,
because the world lacks a proper ''reflection of woman's needs and desires''. She
contends that Edna's suicide was the ''ultimate act of the novel, and as a
culmination, solves her problems and fulfills her needs''.3

She does not view Edna's death as a real suicide, because suicide has as a
prerequisite the taking of one's life into one's hand and Edna never does this. She
never makes a conscious choice. So why does Edna swim out to her death
according to Emmitt? Because she was in search of that proper reflection and
found it in the sea. Emmitt believes that for men, water is self-reflecting, giving
back a narcissistic image, but for women, who have no proper reflections, the sea
is an embrace of self__fuifillment. Emmitt reads The Awakening as a parable of
''female development and liberation''.4

1. George M. Spangler,''Kate Chopin's The Awakening:APartial Dissent''(http://feminism.eserver.org/discourse/Chopin.html)3-4-

2007,p.4.
2. Marco A. Portals,''The Characterization of Edna Pontellier and the Conclusion of Kate Chopin's The Awakening''(http://
www.Womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/macdonald.html)8-5-2007,p.7.
3. Helen V. Emmit,''Drowning in a Willing Sea :Freedom and Drowning in Eliot, Chopin and Drabble''(http://feminism.
eserver.org/discourse/Chopin.html)3-4-2007,p.7.
4. Ibid.,p.9.

86
 A critic and freelance writer Sarah Klein believes that Chopin's
protagonist is clearly symbolic: “Like her name, ''Pontellier''…means ''one who
bridges'', Edna herself is one whose mission is to begin the painful process
of bridging two centuries, two worlds, two visions of gender. So appropriat
as a turn - of the century piece, The Awakening is about the beginning of
selfhood, not its completion. Chopin's novel portrays this process within
Edna just as it takes part in a similar transition as a work of literary art.
The novel is proven to be transitional and revolutionary by the defensive
uproar it produces at the time of publication, even among the ranks of
literary peers such as Willa Cather … Chopin as an author, like
Edna as a character, is a woman caught in the borderlands between the
literary traditions assigned to her as a nineteenth century female writer and the
mores of a new era.‖1

As a writer, Chopin grapples with the old models and looks for her
possible place among the new. As a woman and a hopeful artist, Chopin's
questions about her position in literary history are not unlike those more
naively confronted by her protagonist; should we discard the old models?
And if so, how? If we discard the old models, what will replace them,
and why? Will the new models work for us? Is there a place, a voice
__
for woman, and Artist, and woman Artist, in this new territory? If we
as women want to embrace a new world, will it welcome us with open
arms? The novel offers few, if any, comforting answers to these questions. 2

Chopin gives us a protagonist who chooses suicide because she is unable

to find a place for her newly conscious, fully recognized self within the
constraints of the present social system. Edna's suicide is completely

1. Sarah Klein,''Anticipation of Modernism and Negotiations of Gender in Kate Chopin's The Awakening'',(http://www.women

Writers .net/domesticgoddess/klein.html)3-4-2007,p.9.76

2. Ibid.,p.10

87
''valid'' within the context of her time, when her act of self - recognition
is condemned.Seyersted recognizes that her awakening “… is accompanied
by a growing sense of isolation and aloneness, and also anguish… If the process
of existential individuation is taxing on a man and freedom a lonely and
threatening thing to him, it is doubly so for a woman who attempts to emancipate
herself.”1

An American famous critic and Professor Emeritus of English Michael

T. Gilmore rightly concludes that “ Her quest for self__fulfillment, though it
ends in death, is an insurrectionary act because it calls a civilization into
question; it has to end in death because there is no way for the world she inhabits
to accommodate the change in her…her disaffection proves so total that she
takes her life instead of allowing herself to be reintegrated into the existing
order.”2

As Gilmore recognizes, although Edna and Chopin ultimately do not

reach full transcendence of 19th century constructs and ideals, they nonetheless
“strive to go beyond it and to achieve something approximating the
modernist escape…‖ Both women wish to find a way out of the ''fettering
tradition of nature'' and both aspire to speak, like the brightly colored
parrot introduced on the novel's first page, ''a language which nobody
understands''.3

1. Per Seyersted , Kate Chopin:A Critical Biography(Louisiana State University Press,1969),p.148.

2. Michael T. Gilmore,''Revolt Against Nature :The Problematic Modernism of The Awakening'' New Essays on ''The Awakening''
(Cambridge:Cambridge University P.,1988),p.62.
3. Ibid.,p.65.

88
 Conclusion

In our second chapter we analyzed Kate Chopin and women status in her works.
As we know, women were discriminated and had no rights to vote. Their roles in
political, economic and social lives were not equal to men‘s. The men thought that
women had to get married, have children, look after children and fulfill the duties
of hardworking wives and mothers. These attitudes made the intelligent women
think and write about them. We can say that those intelligent women were brave
and they could fight against the society at that time. One of them was Kate Chopin
who dared to write the feministic issues even thought she didn‘t accept her
feminism. In our second chapter we decided to analyze Kate Chopin‘s works
which were related to the women‘s problem at that time. Therefore in our first
paragraph of the second chapter we analyzed in women characters in Kate
Chopin‘s works. As we know Kate Chopin had two novels At Fault and The
Awakening which depicted women‘s endure to obtain freedom. Moreover she
published two collections of short stories: Bayou Folk, Night in Arcadia and a lot
of uncollected short stories. As for her short stories, we have chosen five of them
which describe a woman as a wife, mother and her problems. They are The Story of
an Hour, The Storm, Madame Célestin's Divorce, Athénaïse, Regret, and A Pair of
Silk Stockings.

Kate Chopin‘s first novel At Fault was the author‘s primary work which depicted
the life of Therese Lafirme. Therese was one of the women who faced women‘s
problems and wanted to be free. Kate Chopin tried to reveal the constraints of the
interior lives of women, their disillusionment, and their attempts to achieve
fulfillment in pre feminist times. At Fault is Kate Chopin‘s novel which vividly
shows women‘s characters although it was not a masterpiece. However there is
another novel which is the best one. This novel has being discussed by a lot of
critics and the critics have analyzed importance of this novel. However it was not
accepted as a good novel when Kate Chopin was alive. This novel is The
89
Awakening. It is one of the earliest American novels that focus on women's issues
without condescension. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early
feminism.

There are some important Kate Chopin‘s feministic short stories which
portrayed women of that time. The Story of an Hour highlights complex issues
involved in the interplay of female independence, love, and freedom. This story is
famous in feministic literature because the writer managed to show the psychology
of her main character who felt her lack-luster relationship with her husband.
Chopin uses the theme of forbidden love to tell a story. The Storm depicts a
woman‘s problems related to sex and relations. To be more specific, adultery.
Chopin also uses symbols to characterize to her personage in A Pair of Silk
Stocking which shows woman‘s burden of being a mother. The woman and the
main character in this story, Mrs. Sommers dared to use fifteen dollars to herself
instead of spending this amount of money to her children. This situation presents
the difficulties of the protagonist after marriage; Mrs. Sommers suffered being a
mother and didn‘t let herself spend even a cent for her own needs. Analyzing this
story we feel the bitter woes of the women of that time. Desiree’s Baby also
indicates the sorrow of being a mother. In this story feministic issues are
intermingled with the problem of abolitionism. At that time black people were
considered to be in a low status and they were treated as slaves. Desiree‘s baby
was born black skinned and this made her feel grief as a mother. Her husband‘s
selfishness became increasingly evident. He could only think of his valuable
family name rather than love to his wife and his own flesh. But at the end of the
story it turned out her husband, Armand was guilty because of his mother‘s secret
who was black-blooded. On the contrary, in Regret the protagonist is an old
woman who regretted not being a mother after spending her time with her
neighbor‘s children.

90
 The next paragraph of this chapter we analyzed historical and cultural
backgrounds of Kate Chopin‘s masterpiece The Awakening. The critics were
shocked by the main protagonist, Edna Pontellier's behavior and considered
Chopin's novel to be immoral and lacking literary value. Moreover this novel was
supposed to be anti-religious therefore there were a lot of disapproving and
approving attitudes toward this novel. Even though there was the difficult and
changeable social atmosphere, many people in the United States, and especially
the media, were not ready to receive Kate Chopin‘s novel at that time. Daniel
S.Rankin published ―Kate Chopin and her Creole stories‖ in 1932 and brought life
and popularity to this novel. Moreover, the well-known translator Cyrille Arnavon
wrote a serious essay on The Awakening and translated this novel into French.
After coming back to life The Awakening in 1969, countless classrooms across the
United States have found in The Awakening a superb example of the transcendent
New Woman.

In the next paragraph we analyzed this novel completely. The Awakening was
very much ahead of its time and it was a feminist masterpiece which the readers
didn‘t notice. The Awakening is the story of one woman's struggle for self –
identity. In addition to Edna, the novel centers on two other female characters.
Mme.Ratignolle represents the quintessential mother – woman figure that society
recognizes and applauds. Her world centers on her husband and children and
outwardly she sacrifices everything for them. However, she uses her children to
call attention to herself, possibly trying to define her existence through them .
Edna pointedly turns away from this picture of a woman and sees another side .
As time passes, she is more aware of her physical body and her desires. She puts
aside her obligations one by one, letting everyday responsibilities drop from her
shoulders as she seeks an independence and freedom usually reserved for men.
She is now able to see herself more clearly as an individual. The main character in
The Awakening Edna could find her identity and Kate Chopin could open women‘s
feelings and grief by Edna‘s action.
91
 Final Conclusion

In our dissertation paper we analyzed Kate Chopin, an American writer of the

XV century, and problems of women in her works. As we know Kate Chopin was
a feminist writer and foresaw The New Woman fifty years before even though she
acclaimed this. Therefore we decided to do researches on feminism and problems
of women in American literature in our first chapter. From history, we can see that
women were discriminated and accepted as low status people by men. Women had
no any rights to vote, to own property, to take the same amount of salary like men
and they had various restrictions in society and at home. Women should only get
married, give birth to children, take after children and fulfill the duties of
hardworking wives and mothers in men‘s meditations. These attitudes toward
women had just been accepted as cultural heritage. Bad position in society brought
women to fight for their rights and to appear the word ―feminism‖.

When we analyzed the history of feminism we decided to do researches on the

waves of feminism which gave us clear conclusion about feminism. There were
three waves of feminism and all waves had their aim and intention. First-wave
feminism term came after coming the second-wave feminism term. First wave
feminism focused on gaining the right of voting, the right to be educated, better
working conditions and double sexual standards in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century in the United States and Europe. The first wave ended with the
introduction of the women's right to vote. Second wave was more concerned with
the restoration of all the rights that women had been denied in the past. This was
extended by the fact that a large share of women had entered into the working
environment after the second world war. Consequently, this wave was more
broadly based because its primary concern was the restoration of women's
economic, political and social rights so as to place them in the same category as
their male. Therefore, it can be argued that the major concern during the first wave
was political but in the second more concern was given to cultural aspects.The

92
third-wave feminism has been the continuation of the second-wave feminism and
a response to the perceived failures. Moreover we analyzed the history of feminism
in the U.S. and U.K.

However the writers who discussed feministic problems and difficulties or

advanced women‘s issues prior to the existence of the feminist movement are
called protofeminists. However some scholars criticize the usage of this term.
Others believe it is important to use this term to express the value of earlier
contributions. We also believe it is crucial to use this term because Kate Chopin
also wrote feministic issues fifty years before feministic movements began.

The first protofeminist writer who wrote about women and women‘s defense was
the Italian writer, Christan de Pizan. She was a famous poet who used her
knowledge of aristocratic custom and fashion of the day, particularly involving
women and the practice of chivalry in her poems. A lot of scholars have argued
that she should be seen as an early feminist who efficiently used language to
convey that women could play an important role within society.

In nineteenth century in America women began to understand that there were

opportunities for them outside of the home, and that they could have a place in the
world as well as men. It was a time when the feministic view was being born and
traditional views of women were changing. First, women would play a part in
working to help slaves gain their freedom in the anti-slavery movement. They felt
they could identify with the way slaves were being treated, therefore wanted to
help them. Middle class women then would begin to realize that they were just the
same as men, and wanted to be treated that way, and take part in the same
activities. This included getting an education, working and being able to support
themselves without the help of men. This changed not only the traditional roles of
women in society, but also their role in the family. With women wanting the right
to vote, work and go to school, middle class life as they knew it would be
drastically changed. Women would no longer be of home with the children
93
cooking and cleaning; they wanted to get out into the world. There was still an
extremely long way to go before women were to be accepted in society, and this
was just the beginning.
Margaret Fuller was the most influential primary feminist writer, the colourful
journalist, editor and women's rights advocate. She wrote Woman in the Nineteenth
Century which was published in 1845 and accepted as the first major feminist work
in the United States. Woman in the Nineteenth Century is best understood as a
work in progress, one of many provisional texts needed to widen the
Enlightenment concept of liberation in the aftermath of the American and French
Revolutions. The Constitution of the United States is perhaps the primary political
document of this sort, emerging as it did from a narrow understanding of the
"universal" citizen (like as white and male) and slowly made better over time in an
effort to give support to this abstract political subject with social justice.

There are also some important figures which are urgent to be mentioned when
we talk about feminism in America. An American social activist, abolitionist
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815 –1902) organized the first U.S. women‘s rights
convention in Seneca Falls, New York, to discuss women‘s civil rights. Elizabeth
Stanton wrote a Declaration of Sentiments to demand political equality and voting
rights for women. She is the most productive writer in feministic literature. The
publisher and business manager of this journal was American civil rights leader
Susan B. Anthony (1820 – 1906). She was one of the most important figures who
fought for women‘s rights. The women-teachers also suffered by discrimination at
that time because women-teachers were not paid the same as men-teachers and
they were not accepted as smart as men. An Native American activist Matilda
Joslyn Gage (1826 –1898) was a suffragist, an abolitionist, a freethinker, and a
prolific author. These figures are the most important in feministic literature.

Regarding our main aim of the dissertation paper, we did researches in Kate
Chopin‘s biography to know the influences on the writer, why she wrote feminist

94
issues in her works in our second paragraph of the first chapter. Kate Chopin was
an American prominent writer of short stories and novels, a poet, essayist, and a
memoirist. Chopin grew up among intellectual women. Kate was lucky by having
many female teachers throughout her childhood; either the strong and independent
widows in her family or the intellectual nuns of her school, who taught Kate to live
a "life of the mind as well as the life of the home." Kate could see the problems of
these women and she also felt sorrow as their grief during her life. However she
was able to write women‘s problem in contrast to the women around her. Chopin
said to herself that she was neither a feminist nor a suffragist; she was simply a
woman who had the ability to be strong, individual, and free-spirited.

In the third paragraph we analyzed Kate Chopin‘s contribution to the feminist

literature. Kate Chopin could foresee the New Woman before fifty years in her
novels and some short stories. Her best short story in feministic issue is The Story
of an Hour which is about the woman who was unhappy and was compelled to be
married by tradition and custom of that time. She tried to be free and thus she
became glad by her husband‘s death. The Awakening is Kate Chopin‘s second
novel which became famous after fifty years even though it was highly
controversial in its time. The next prominent short story is Her Letters which
presents both female, male characters. This story deals with the heaviest of human
topics including love, death, grief, doubt and memory. It is one of Kate Chopin‘s
absorbing short stories which described inner world of women.

In the second chapter of our dissertation we analyzed the importance of women

status in Kate Chopin‘s works. We did researches on women‘s character in Kate
Chopin‘s works. If we know our author‘s heroines then we can analyze their status
at that time. Kate Chopin succeeded in giving a woman's voice to realism. This
seems to be a higher order of feminism than repeating the story of a woman as
victim. She gives her female protagonist the central role, normally reserved for the
man. Most stories being written at the time were about male characters and their
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stories, not the women. Kate Chopin changed that. Her themes are a much more
controversial matter; it was the repression of women in the nineteenth century
America. This theme was presented in her famous novel The Awakening and most
of her short stories.

Her short stories, The Story of an Hour, Her Letters, The Storm, A Pair of Silk
Stockings, Desire’s Baby and Regret examine the grief of women in society, the
society that set up standards and ideals to which women were expected to
conform. The Story of an Hour highlights complex issues involved in the interplay
of female independence, love, and freedom. This story is famous in feministic
literature because the writer managed to show the psychology of her main
character who felt her lack-luster relationship with her husband. Chopin uses the
theme of forbidden love to tell a story. Louise Mallard obviously feels trapped in
her marriage and her image as True Woman. Believing that her husband's death
releases her from the obligations society assigned her, she allows herself to dream
of freedom, only to have that freedom suddenly revoked. The unnamed woman in
Her Letters has the most success of finding her place in between the two ideals,
living the deceptive role of a faithful wife, while having a secret love affair.
However, her destruction of the norms has devastating effects on her husband who
cannot fathom a woman, especially his wife, challenging the authority of society in
such a manner. In A Pair of Silk Stocking Kate Chopin shows her heroine as a
suffered woman who became poor and came to grief after her marriage. This story
also shows woman‘s burden of being a mother. The woman and the main character
in this story, Mrs. Sommers dared to use fifteen dollars to her instead of spending
this amount of money for her children. This situation presents the difficulties of
the protagonist after marriage; Mrs. Sommers suffered being a mother and didn‘t
let her spend even a cent for her own needs. Analyzing this story we feel the bitter
woes of the women of that time. Desiree’s Baby also indicates the sorrow of being
a mother. In this story feministic issues are intermingled with the problem of
abolitionism. At that time black people were considered to be in a low status and
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they were treated as slaves. Desiree‘s baby was born black skinned and this made
her feel grief as a mother. Her husband‘s selfishness became increasingly evident.
He could only think of his valuable family name rather than love to his wife and
his own flesh. But at the end of the story it turned out her husband, Armand, was
guilty because of his mother‘s secret that was black-blooded. On the contrary, in
Regret the protagonist is an old woman who regretted not being a mother after
spending her time with her neighbor‘s children.

The best disputable work of Kate Chopin is The Awakening which definitely
shows feministic issues so in our next paragraph of the second chapter we
analyzed the historical background of this novel. The Awakening is meaningful
title testifies the author's revolutionizing intentions, she, for the first time, openly
acknowledged the wish of being free in women. So this novel was failure to a
successful regionalist writer. The critics were shocked by the main protagonist,
Edna Pontellier's behavior and considered Chopin's novel to be immoral and
lacking literary value. Also in this novel were seen as anti-religious therefore there
were a lot of disapproving and approving attitudes toward this novel. Even though
there was the difficult and changeable social atmosphere, many people in the
United States, and especially the media, were not ready to receive Kate Chopin‘s
novel at that time. Daniel S.Rankin published “Kate Chopin and her Creole
stories” in 1932 and brought life and popularity to this novel. Moreover, the well-
known translator Cyrille Arnavon wrote a serious essay on The Awakening and
translated this novel into French. After coming back to life The Awakening in
1969, countless classrooms across the United States have found in The Awakening
a superb example of the transcendent New Woman. This novel has been read and
analyzed with great interest since 1932.

In the next paragraph of our second chapter we analyzed The Awakening and
women problems for identity in this novel. Unlike the nineteenth century fictional
heroines before her, Edna Pontellier in The Awakening protests against artificial

97
definitions of femininity and journeys to discover not ''life'' but ''self''. When
midway through the novel, Edna announces, ''I would give my life for my children,
but I wouldn't give myself,''. In Chopin's portrayal of Edna, that aspect, which
brings to American fiction, a wholly original conception of the female hero is the
gradual revelation of a woman's inner life, an area of consciousness so universally
disregarded by earlier writers as to deny the fact of its existence. It is in defining
the precise nature of that self, in revealing the rich, inner life of a woman who
defies tradition that Chopin's unique and incontestable artistry lies. Indeed, Chopin
brings to literature a woman who chooses to sacrifice ''life'' in the insistence on and
celebration of ''self''. If, in the creation of this woman, Chopin utters a cry of
anguish at the plight of being female in a patriarchal world, she expresses as well,
in the story of Edna Pontellier, a sign at the terrible loss to all of humanity
whenever the attempt to find and to be true to the self is defeated.

As a final conclusion we can say that Kate Chopin is a feminist writer and she
opened women‘s problem in her most works.

98
 List of Literature

1. I. Karimov. Harmoniously developed generation is the basis of progress of

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3. Bloom, Harold ―Kate Chopin”. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
4. Boron, Lynda S. and Sara Desaussure Davis ―Kate Chopin Reconsidered:
Beyond the Bayou”. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992.
5. Buhle, Mari Jo. Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920.Urbana; U of
Illinois.
6. Chopin, Kate. "Confidences" The Complete Works of Kate Chopin Ed. Per
Seyersted. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State UP, 1969. pp700-702
7. Chopin, Kate. ''The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin”,
ed.Barbara H. Solomon. New York : Penguin,1976.
8. Chopin, Kate ―The Awakening”. Louisiana State University: Baton Rough,
1972.
9. Cooper, James Fenimore. ―The Last of the Mohicans”. Oxford: Word's
Classics, 1988.
10.Cully, Margaret ―The Awakening; An Authoritative Text Context Criticism”.
NewYork: Nortorn, (1976).
11.Cutter, Martha J. Unruly Tongue: Identity and Voice in American Women's
Writing 1850-1930.Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1999.
12.Donaldson-Evans, Mary. A Woman's Revenge: The Chronology of
Dispossession in Maupassant's Fiction. Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum,
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13. Dugan, John Raymon. Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Descriptive
Techniques on Works of Guy de Maupassant. Paris: Mouton, 1973.

99
14.Dutch feminist pioneer Mina Kruseman in a letter to Alexandre Dumas – in:
Maria Grever, Strijd tegen de stilte. Johanna Naber (1859-1941) en de
vrouwenstem in geschiedenis (Hilversum 1994) ISBN 065503951, page 31
15.Dyer, Joyce.''The Awakening'': A Novel of Beginning. New York: Twayne,
1993.
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17.Dugan, John Raymon. ―Illusion and Reality: A study of the Descriptive
Techniques on the Works of Guy de Mauspassant”. Paris: Mouton, 1973
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Chopin and Drabble''.http://feminism. eserver.org/discourse/Chopin.html.
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Women''(http;//www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/awakening/essay1.html
)20-5-2007,p.4.
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n9363439/print.
21.Fraser, Sir Hugh. ―The Representation of the People Act, 1918 with explanatory
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22.Fusco, Richard. Maupassant and the American Short Story: The Influence of
Form at the Turn of the Century. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State UP, 1994 p
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23.Gilmore, Michael T. ''Revolt Against Nature :The Problematic Modernism of
The Awakening'' New Essays on ''The Awakening'' (Cambridge:Cambridge
University P.,1988)
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Chopin-and her critics.html.
25.Hawthorne, Nathaniel ―The Scarlet Letter” . (New York:Chelsea House
Publisher, 1982)

100
26."Her Letters" Ed. Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State
UP, 1969. pp3 401
27.Jone, Emma.'' A study of Edna's Character ''.
http://www.dreamessays/Kate%20 Chopin /2330.htm.
28.Klein, Sarah ''Anticipation of Modernism and Negotiations of Gender in
Kate Chopin's The Awakening'',(http://www.womenWriters
.net/domesticgoddess/klein.html)3-4-2007,p.9.76
29.Koloski, Bernard, ''Preface'',Approaches to Teaching Chopin's 'The
Awakening''.New York: MLA, 1988.
30.Leslie. F. Goldstein "Early Feminist Themes in French Utopian Socialism: The
St.-Simonians and Fourier"
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31.MacDonald, Erin E. ''Kate Chopin's Gender- Awakening''.http://w
ww.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddss/macdonald.htm.
32.Martin, Wendy ed. New Essays on ''The Awakening''. Cambridge : Cambridge
UP,1988.
33.Murphy, Cullen. ―The Word According to Eve”, First Mariner Books, 1999,
pp. 21–23. ISBN 0-395-70113-9
34.Offen, Karen. "Les origines des mots 'feminisme' et 'feministe". Revue
d'histoire moderne et contemporaine. July–September 1987 34: 492
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36.Oxford English Dictionary (online ed.). Oxford University Press. June
2012. (Definition is of noun.)
37.Pankhurst, Emmeline “My own Story”1914
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Conclusion of Kate Chopin's The Awakening''. http://
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39.Records of the Open Door Council. London Metropolitan University, Women's
Library. Archives in London
40.Richter David H, Falling int Theory; Conflicting Views on Reading Literature
(Boston :Bedford, 1994)
41.Robinson, Lillian '' Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon'' (http://
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in Women's Experience''. http://www.women writers.
net/domesticgoddess/lv.html.2007.
43.Seyersted, Per ―Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography”
. Louisiana State University Press:Baton Rouge,1969.
44.Schopenhauer, Arthur. ―The World as Will and Representation”. New York :
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45.Schopenhauer, Arthur “Essays and Aphorisms”, (New York:Penguin Books ,
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49.Skaggs, Peggy ―KateChopin”. Boston:Twayne.Publishers, 1980.
50.Stanton, Elizabeth Cady ―The Matriarchate or Mother-Age, in Avery, Rachel
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51.Taylor, Helen ―Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace king, Ruth
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52.Toth, Emily ―Kate Chopin”( New York: Morrow,1990)

102
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55.Trunzo, Stephanie. ''Chopin and Schopenhauer :Similar Philosophies''.
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60.Woolf, Virginia ―A Room of One's Own”, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co.,
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