The Awakening
Kate Chopin is renowned for writing novels that depict women and their struggles within a patriarchal-dominated society. The Awakening was highly controversial literature during its time and explored the conditions of women in marriage throughout the nineteenth century. In modern times, the text has been rediscovered and recognized as a crucial text that develops deeper insights into feminist issues. Women in the Awakening, including the protagonist-Edna, are exemplified as women who are incessantly in search of their identity. Edna is demonstrated as a woman who is uncomfortable performing “patriarchal” roles while facing a challenge of obtaining either of the other two roles. This essay focuses on how the women in Kate Chopin’s stories share a commonality: Most of them seem to be trapped in confining gender roles, yet they all find a way to challenge those roles or subvert them, while still keeping the role itself intact.
In a bid to comprehend the woman’s social roles in Edna’s society and that of other female characters whom Chopin compares with, it is fundamental to understand the tenets within the patriarchal society during the nineteenth century. According to Chopin, the patriarchy society entails a society characterized by a culture that exclusively privileges males by upholding and promoting traditional gender roles. In the Awakening, the women’s assertiveness and self-confidence are undermined by a patriarchal system which serves to place females in a submissive role, thus allowing men to control them easily.
The roles of men and women differ in Chopin’s patriarchal society whereby most women like Edna, marriage represents “death- a death of the true independent self” (Chopin 42). In other words, the institution of marriage, coupled with a woman’s gender and societal roles suppress a woman’s erotic life; hence making her nothing but her husband’s other half. Chopin (106) states that “…substantiate a hidden, sensual life – her real life- and she prefers the memory of that life to the empty reality of her marriage”. Consequently, this quote shows that the collapse of the institution of marriage forces the women in the story to find themselves-an independent fulfilment that is outside the confines of marriage.
On the other hand, despite being confined within a patriarchal society and gender roles, the women in the story rise against these institutions, whose reactions against gender roles is deeply rooted in their decision not to destroy the letters. In essence, their decision not to destroy the letters makes them take control of their destiny, particularly the destiny of their identity. Eventually, the desire to realize self-confidence and a self-identity become a focus to subvert the patriarchal system which has objected the women throughout their lives. Symbolically, destroying the letters would be destroying the only remaining part of their inner being, that would subsequently pave the way for the woman’s self-constructed roles in her marriage, instead of the socially constructed gender roles that foster a patriarchal world. Consequently, through the letters, the women are able to recreate the passion which marriage tries to obscure beneath the paltriness of patriarchal principles, to become once more that concealed self which signifies “…the reality that conventions and superficial perceptions only distort or conceal- the true identity which only the woman possesses (Kate Chopin p.106).
Work Cited
Chopin, Kate. The awakening: and other stories. Oxford Paperbacks, 2000.