Female Identity in Chopin & Perkins Gilman

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
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Pontellier Awakening, Yellow Wallpaper, Women Economics, Perkins Gilman, Wallpaper--not Awakening, Awakening Gilman's, WW Norton, Margo Culley, , yellow wallpaper, charlotte perkins, Amherst Massachusetts, norton critical, perkins gilman, norton critical edition, charlotte perkins gilman, critical edition, edition york ww, 2nd ed, culley 2nd, ed norton, margo culley, ww norton 1994, awakening ed, critical edition york,
Approximate Word count = 1435
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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