The purpose of this research is to examine the main characters in the novella The Awakening by Kate Chopin and the short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman with a view toward showing that the assertion of distinctively adult female identity in what is profoundly a world where the identities of women are not valued carries enormous personal risk, not only for the individuals involved but also for the well-being of the societies in which they function.
At one level, the character of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening describes the intensely subjective assertion of a right to a new (or anyway distinctive) social identity as a woman in a world not of her making. Though at the center of that world's material advantages, Edna is nevertheless alien, estranged, trapped. Her emotional truth is an intense, unre lenting internal struggle that surfaces in encounters with the boundaries and personalities of a sharply defined social mil ieu. To put it another way, Chopin develops such encounter as the core conflict of Edna's being. It can be seen in the small domestic moment after the concert when she reclines in the hammock and does not agree with Pontellier that it is time for her to be in bed: "Another time she would have gone in at his request . . . not with any sense of submission or obedience to his compelling wishes, but unthinkingly" (Chopin 30). The point is that Edna has begun, however diffidently, to think for herself, to make an assertion of independent, subjective moral entitlement in an environment hostile to any such action.
But it seems inappropriate to see The Awakening as a fem inist political tract. It is a personal story of a woman trying to find her way, now by determined quest, now by diffident experimentation with scandal, but always in tension with an environment that stifles idiosyncratic impulses against convention. ""I am a devilishly wicked specimen of the sex," she says. "But some way I can't co...