Female Identity in Chopin & Perkins Gilman

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, unrelenting internal struggle that surfaces in encounters with the boundaries and personalities of a sharply defined social milieu. 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, sub

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oral state of solitary splendor: "The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. . . . [W]hen . . . there beside the sea, absolutely alone, she . . . felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known" (Chopin 108-9). Charlotte Perkins Gilman appears to have understood the extent to which social reality informs women's psychic condition in a society that disempowers and devalues them. In an 1899 excerpt from Women in Economics included with the Norton critical edition of The Awakening, she cites the "false position of woman" in domestic society, deploring especially structures of domestic experience in which a husband has "whole human creature consecrated to his direct personal service, to pleasing and satisfying him in every way possible . . . [which] has kept man selfish beyond the degree incidental to our stage of social growth" (Gilman 153-4). Gilman's commentary does not deal specifically with The Awakening; however, it is consistent with Edna's experience of domestic life. Equally, Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" provides a glimpse into the social consequences of being a wife in a false positi

Category: Literature - F