Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa (CTLLI), 2015-2016.

Unit 1 Study
Guide

COMENTARIO DE TEXTOS
LITERARIOS EN LENGUA INGLESA
GRADO

UNIT 2 GUIDE | ANALYZING NARRATIVE TEXTS

2022-2023
GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES:
LENGUA, LITERATURA Y CULTURA
Adriana Kiczkowski (co-ordinator)
Isabel Castelao
Inés Ordiz

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 Comentario de Textos Literarios en Lengua Inglesa
STUDY GUIDE-UNIT 2
Analyzing Narrative Texts

Introduction

1. What is Prose Fiction?

1.1. Elements of Fiction

2. Textual analysis: Kate Chopin, The Awakening (novel).

2.1. Cultural and literary contextualization
2.1.1. Biographical information
2.1.2. Historical and cultural context.
2.2. Analysis of narrative structure, style and language
 Self-Study activities/answers.
2.3. Main themes in The Awakening.
2.4.
3. Literary Criticism:
3.1. “Feminism Criticism Literary Criticism”
 Self-Study activities (not compulsory).
3.2. Critical authors.
3.2.1. Fragment by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “Infection in the
sentence: The woman writer and the anxiety of authorship” in The
madwoman in the attic. The woman writer and the 19th century literary
imagination.
 Self-Study activities/answers.

4. Quiz (Curso Virtual).

5. References
6. Further resources

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INTRODUCTION

This unit is dedicated to the analysis of narrative texts. As an introduction to the

subject, we are going to read different definitions of the genre as well as the most
important structural elements to take into account when analyzing fiction.
Then, we will read The Awakening, the novel written by the American writer Kate
Chopin at the end of the 19th century.
We will analyze the novel from the perspective of contemporary women's studies
criticism. To do so, we will first the main tenets and concepts of Feminist Literary
Criticism. As in the previous section, you have a series of questions to guide you in
reading and understanding the text. We will also study the concept of “anxiety of
authorship” proposed by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their renowned book
The Madwoman in the Attic.
In this unit you will find some audiovisual resources that will help you in your
study.
Don't forget to answer the Quiz when you finish the Study Guide in the virtual
course, it will allow you to see to what extent you have understood some of the key
questions in this unit.

1. WHAT IS PROSE FICTION?

Stories are a part of daily life in every culture. Stories are what we tell when we return from
vacation or survive an accident or illness. They help us make sense of growing up or growing
old, of a hurricane or a war, of the country and world we live in. In conversations, a story may
be invited by the listener (“What did you do last night?”) or initiated by the teller (“Guess what I
saw when I was driving home!”). We assume such stories are true, or at least that they are meant
to describe an experience honestly. Of course, many of the stories we encounter daily, from jokes
to online games to television sitcoms to novels and films, are intended to be fiction— that is,
stories or narratives about imaginary persons and events. Every story, however, whether a
news story, sworn testimony, idle gossip, or a fairy tale, is always a version of events told from
a particular perspective (or several), and it may be incomplete, biased, or just plain made up. As
we listen to others’ stories, we keep alert to the details, which make the stories rich and
entertaining. But we also need to spend considerable time and energy making sure that we
accurately interpret what we hear: We ask ourselves who is telling the story, why the story is
being told, and whether we have all the information we need to understand it fully. Even
newspaper articles, which are supposed to tell true stories— the facts of what actually
happened— may be open to such interpretation. […] Our everyday interpretation of the stories
we hear from various sources—including other people, television, newspapers, and
advertisements— has much in common with the interpretation of short stories […]. In fact, you’ll
probably discover that the processes of reading, responding to, and writing about stories are
already somewhat familiar to you. Most readers already know, for instance, that they should pay
close attention to seemingly trivial details; they should ask questions and find out more about any
matters of fact that seem mysterious, odd, or unclear. Most readers are well aware that words can
have several meanings and that there are alternative ways to tell a story. How would someone
else have told the story? What are the storyteller’s perspective and motives? What is the context
of the tale— for instance, when is it supposed to have taken place and what was the occasion of
telling it? These and other questions from our experience of everyday storytelling are equally
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relevant in reading fiction. Similarly, we can usually tell in reading a story or hearing it whether it is supposed
to make us laugh, shock us, or provoke some other response (Mays, 12-13).

The most studied form of prose fiction is the novel. Below, you’ll find excerpts from
The Thing Called Literature: reading, thinking, writing by Andrew Bennet and Nicholas Royle
which introduce this concept:
The novel in its modern form is a strange creature, a peculiar cross-breed or chimera. It emerged
more than three hundred years ago out of various forms of storytelling and reportage – journalism,
the epistolary (letter-writing), accounts of remarkable lives, chronicles, travellers’ tales,
romances, ballads, news-sheets, and so on. Partly for this reason, the novel is almost infinitely
malleable: it is highly diverse in its form, in its subject-matter and in its style. Constantly
evolving, the novel adheres to no consistent set of rules or procedures. One might say that the
rule of the novel is to break the rules. In fact, the novel is always – how can we put it? – novel.
The word ‘novel’ comes from the French nouvelle, which originates in the Latin novellae,
meaning ‘news’. So one way of thinking of the novel might be as a narrative that tells us
something ‘new’ – it reads you the news, so to speak. Certainly, novels that work well are those
that give you a sense that you are experiencing something new. They tell you a story, present you
with people, places, situations, events, ideas and feelings in a way that seems new, fresh, even
unprecedented. That, in a word, is what a novel is, or should be: it records, explores and prompts
you to think of something new, in a new way. […] The word ‘fiction’ also includes the short
story and novella, of course, but is in any case taken to designate the kind of writing that departs
from the real, from what we like to think of as real life. Fiction is, after all, thought of as precisely
not ‘real’ life, not true. In fact the novel is shot through, from its beginnings in the late seventeenth
century right up to today, with this question of its fictional/real status. In a sense, that is what
every novel entails: an experience of undecidability, uncertainty about the real. (Bennet and
Royle, 39).
The development of the novel indeed is characterized by a concern with the relationship between
historical authenticity and invention or fiction. So while contemporary novelists may not
explicitly claim that their narratives are historical accounts or concern actual events, they tend
nevertheless to work hard to produce effects of credibility, of ‘reality’. Contemporary fiction is
often portrayed as preoccupied, even obsessed with the relationship between its own fictionality,
its inventedness, and the real that it purports to represent. In fact, however, this has been the
condition of novel-writing from the beginning. (Bennet and Royle, 42).
“Novels are the great art form of mind-reading. Indeed, we would suggest, they reflect on other
minds in richer and more nuanced ways than any other discourse, including psychiatry,
psychology and psychoanalysis. Novels allow us to know, or perhaps more accurately to imagine
or believe that we know, precisely what goes on in the minds of others, to understand other minds.
So in reading, discussing, studying and writing about a novel, it is important to consider how it
presents other minds, how it creates and plays with this illusion. (Bennet and Royle, 45).

1.1. Elements of Fiction.

Kelly J. Mays proposes a series of questions that will help us to organize our
reading and subsequent reflection on a narrative text, taking into account the
different elements that make it up and that we must keep in mind in our analysis.

Questions about the Elements of Fiction

• Expectations: What do you expect?

° from the title? from the first sentence or paragraph?

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 ° after the first events or interactions of characters?
° as the conflict is resolved?

• What happens in the story?

° Do the characters or the situation change from the beginning to the end?
° Can you summarize the plot? Is it a recognizable kind or genre of story?

• How is the story narrated?

° Is the narrator identified as a character?
° Is it narrated in the past or present tense?
° Is it narrated in the first, second, or third person?
° Do you know what every character is thinking, or only some characters,
or none?

• Who are the characters?

° Who is the protagonist(s) (hero, heroine)?
° Who is the antagonist(s) (villain, opponent, obstacle)?
° Who are the other characters? What is their role in the story?
° Do your expectations change with those of the characters, or do you
know more or less than each of the characters?

• What is the setting of the story?

° When does the story take place?
° Where does it take place?
° Does the story move from one setting to another? Does it move in one direction
only or back and forth in time and place?

• What do you notice about how the story is written?

° What is the style of the prose? Are the sentences and the vocabulary simple or
complex?
° Are there any images, figures of speech or symbols?
° What is the tone or mood? Does the reader feel sad, amused, worried, curious?

• What does the story mean? Can you express its theme or themes?
° Answers to these big questions may be found in many instances in your answers
to the previous questions. The story’s meaning or theme depends on all its
features (Mays 15).

For the study of the elements of fiction, we have prepared the following
VIDEOCLASS:

 Elements of Fiction by Dr. Dídac Llorens Cubedo

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2. TEXTUAL ANALYSIS.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin.

2.1 Cultural and literary contextualization

2.1.1. Biographical information

Kate Chopin (née Katherine O’Flaherty) was born in

Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1850. Her mother was a
Creole, her father, a prosperous Irish immigrant.
Creoles (also known as Acadian or Cajuns), were the
French immigrants and their descendants from the
Northern Canadian French colony into the South of
the United States. The O’Flaherty was a wealthy and
socially well-placed family due to the father business
and lived in a colonial mansion. French, patua and
English were spoken in the house. Thanks to her
mother and grandmother, important female figures for
Chopin, she received a good education based on
European and French culture. She went to a Catholic
board school, where the nuns also encouraged
European intellectual reading and critical thinking.
When her father died, the family became strongly
matrilineal and the women in the house organized the
business and house, surviving the cruel times of the American Civil War (1860-1865).
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 Kate Chopin married a Creole from Louisiana when she was twenty years old.
They spoke French as first language and lived in the cosmopolitan city of New Orleans
for many years, where Chopin had several children and dedicated herself to raising them,
reading and playing music, since she was a talented pianist. Her husband supported her
independent and intellectual spirit and both of them enjoyed raising and educating their
big family.
They moved to a small town, to start a cotton plantation when her husband’s
business in New Orleans broke. Chopin was soon known as an eccentric, solitary but
amiable woman in the community. She used to horse-ride, smoke cigars in the porch and
take long walks on her own, acts of subversive autonomy that were criticized by a
conservative Southern society that rigidly established feminine stereotyped behaviors for
women.

A professional writing career

When her husband died of tropical fever, she decided to move to Saint Louis with
her mother to have family support. Unfortunately, her mother died just a year later.
Widowed and alone Chopin devoted herself completely to writing and became a
professional writer at age 35. These years in Saint Louis were extremely prolific: she
composed music, wrote her first novel, At Fault (1890), and two collections of short
stories: Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897. She founded the first literary
society of Saint Louis and was in touch with the intellectuals of the city.

Reception of The Awakening

Kate Chopin wrote The Awakening (1899) in two years and thought of it her most
complex and mature work since in its writing she condensed her rich intellectual baggage
and her eclectic literary influences. But after the publication of this book, expected to be
a success due to the previous literary reception of her “regional” or “local color” stories
and novel (i.e. depicting Southern colonial life in a realistic way and following the precepts
of female sentimental novels), her life changed radically. The Awakening was banned
from libraries and considered a scandal, being defined as “sex fiction” and morally
inadequate. Some of the literary reviewers defined the book as “an essentially vulgar
story”, or, “it is sad and mad and bad”; one of them implied “To think of Kate Chopin, who
once contented herself with mild yarns about genteel Creole life…blowing us a hot blast
like that!” (Gilbert and Gubar 991). Even Willa Cather, the influential American female
writer, strongly criticized the book and coined it the “Creole Bovary”.
Chopin justified herself in the following terms:

Having a group of people at my disposal, I thought it might be entertaining (to myself) to

throw them together and see what would happen. I never dreamed of Mrs. Pontellier making
such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did. If I had had the slightest
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 intimation of such a thing I would have excluded her from the company. (Gilbert and Gubar
9)

But despite this light-hearted retreat as self-defence did not prevent her career as
a writer from suffering a terrible blow. Not only was her social life affected, but she also
gave up intention of further publication, as was the case for her last story “A Storm”. The
publishing house that was going to publish her last collection of short stories A Vocation
and a Voice, withdrew its acceptance. Her health also deteriorated quickly until her death
few years later in 1904.
The book quickly disappeared from print and was totally forgotten in the American
canon, only to be recovered as a literary gem of the fin-de-siècle American literature
more than half a century later. An inexhaustible corpus of criticism emerged on the author
and The Awakening, principally by the hand of the flourishing feminist literary criticism of
the 1970s and 1980s. Nowadays, it is the fifth most read book in first year University
courses in the United States; the book has become a classic in American literary history.

2.1.2. Historical and cultural context

Turn-of-the-century or fin-de-siècle radical changes

In order to understand the cultural contextualization of the novel we have to

take into account the socio-historical and literary phenomena taking place at the end
of the 19th century in the United States. The “turn-of-the-century”, as it is called, or
fin-de-siècle, is located in the last decades of the Victorian period (1880-1900) and
marked drastic changes in Anglo-American and European societies, opening the field
to new orders in Western society, culture and thought into modernity and the
Twentieth century.

In the United States, the industrial and economic revolution was making of
the country a world-leader of capitalism and materialist success, with the consequent
growth of urban cities, rich middle-class and bourgeois values and the decline of rural
America and its way of life. The disillusionment of intellectuals towards this new
materialist society, together with a reaction to mid-nineteenth century American
romanticism, and the influence of European realism in fiction, made writers focus
their interest on a sociological and realistic portray of society and culture. Realism
wanted to emphasize the role and impact of social changes into the new modern
individual, but also the importance of the subjective perspective of reality within the
individual and his/her agency and interaction with the environment (examples are,
among others, Henry James’s psychological realism and Edith Wharton’s social
novels).

On the other hand, scientific development and philosophical thought advanced

shocking views on the human being. These were very different to the ones
established during the nineteenth century, which were based on religion and fixed
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social structures. Darwin’s theory and Nietzsche’s philosophy helped to proclaim the
“death of God” and placed the emphasis on incipient social and cultural reorganizing
paradigms on scientific enquiry and individual-centered ethics.

In Europe, apart from French realism, other avant-garde aesthetic

revolutions, such as symbolism (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Swinburn) or British turn-of-
the-century Decadentism (Oscar Wilde) were being developed. These movements
conceived art and creative impulse in radical different ways to the Victorian utilitarian
perspective of writing as a didactic tool to teach decorum and maintain the social
order. The aesthetic value, instead of the functional value of art, condensed in the
Decadents’ axiom of “art for art’s sake”, came forefront, with two important
consequences that would settle throughout the beginning of twentieth-century
Modernism: art and writing will separate from the masses and mainstream readers,
becoming “high art”; and artistic medium (e.g. language in literature) would cease to
be transparent in order to represent a certain reality to become signifying or
meaningful in its own form.

The New Woman and the “ideology of true womanhood”

It could be argued that one of the most important cultural revolution of the
turn-of-the-century Anglo-American historical period was the questioning of gender
roles in society by the activism of the first-wave feminist movement and the
phenomenon of the New Woman. If there were two clear women’s movements during
these decades, they would be 1) a suffrage movement that searched the vote for
women appealing to the conservative feminine models of mothers and educators,
and 2) a more radical feminist movement that advocated for sexual liberation for
women and professional equality accessing the public space like men did. The figure
of the New Woman had more in common with this second political feminist vision.
She represented the cultural and social phenomenon of the liberated woman who
pursued professional careers, rebelled against the institution of marriage, and had
creative curiosity and ambition as well as intellectual autonomy. Elaine Showalter
states the term was coined in a journal in 1894 and the main feature was “social
nonconformity” contesting to all the previous nineteenth-century impositions on
women and femininity as marriage, motherhood and domesticity.

The New Women rejected conventional female roles, redefined female sexuality, and
asserted their rights to higher education and the professions.

[New Womanhood was a] product of new women’s colleges, drawn to urban centers and in
rebellion against their mothers and marriage. […] In American cities, especially New York,
bohemian New Women, including art students, editors, actresses, and journalists, ‘could be
seen on the street, walking alone, or on the omnibuses […] marked by a graceful, athletic
bearing and the lack of a wedding ring’. […] They no longer saw themselves as ‘friendless,
forlorn, and sexually vulnerable,’ like the Hagar figures in nineteenth-century women’s
fiction, but rather as daring modern heroines in search of feminine self-realization. (Showalter

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 244).

This new feminist phenomenon would revolutionize womanhood in the

twentieth-century and would change forever the ways women would see themselves
in Western societies, particularly in relation to their feminine identity and their
relationships to the public (as opposed to the private). This change would break what
is known as the Victorian “cult or ideology of true womanhood”, deeply established in
nineteenth century’s culture and society.

The Southern states of the United States took the cult of true womanhood to
the extreme in their own version of the “Southern lady”, and younger version
“Southern belle”. The “Southern lady” was demanded to construct her feminine
identity onto the virtues of submission, religiousness, rectitude, morality and
domesticity; she had to be delicate, charming, seductive, without being overtly
sensual, and intelligent to organize the plantation household. In short, the femininity
of the Southern lady was a socio-political tool to maintain the Southern lifestyle and
slavery system. No wonder the turn-of-the-century New Woman was seen as a
danger to the South and took a longer and more marginal path to be heard in its
society.

The passivity (towards the masculinist power to design his own place and
ways of living) and the self-sacrifice (since a woman renounced to build her own life)
required by this cult of true womanhood was clearly exposed in the famous poem by
Coventry Patmore “The Angel in the House” (1885). But as Gilbert and Gubar
suggest, at the turn-of-the-century Anglo-American socio-historical context, “while
moralists, educators, and physicians continued to explain to women why they should
lead decorous, selfless private lives as wives and mothers, a number of artists
responded angrily and triumphantly to the fact that many women no longer did so”
(1985: 956); and, definitely, Kate Chopin proved this in The Awakening (1899).

2.2. Analysis of narrative structure, style and language

Before you read this analysis of the text, we recommend you finish the novel.
While you’re reading the analysis, try to think of examples that prove each of the points
made. For example: the analysis says that “The narrative stance oscillates between
showing intense descriptive language that reflects approval towards the thoughts of
Edna’s independence and a more judicial voice that presents Edna sometimes as
impulsive”. Can you think of a specific example in the novel where this can be clearly
seen? Doing this will help you approach the text as a whole and it will make it easier for
you to work on the more specific self-study questions proposed below.

The author divided the book in 39 Chapters that show short scenes and brief
events. She did not choose to title the chapters but to number them with a clear
division of content between the first sixteen chapters that are set in the summer resort
of Grand Isle, and the following chapters that are set in the city of New Orleans with
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a final return to Grand Isle marking a circular narrative structure. The spatial setting
of the novel is between the seacoast and natural scenery and the cosmopolitan
background of the big Southern city. The temporal frame is short, comprising no more
than two years in the life of the main character.

Regarding the narrative voice, there is an omniscient third person narrator

in the story, who is not detached, as we could expect by the influence of French
realism, but who, contrarily takes a fluid and sometimes contradictory narrative
stance towards the description of Edna, her thoughts and actions. Most of the
information about the psychic life and inner development of Edna is done through the
narrative voice. Probably the most important fact about the book that caused the
harsh reception it received was the fact that the narrative voice does not show moral
condemnation but, as Sullivan and Smith cleverly evidence, the narrator also lacks a
constant and steady effusive sympathy towards the character. The narrative stance
oscillates between showing intense descriptive language that reflects approval
towards the thoughts of Edna’s independence and a more judicial voice that presents
Edna sometimes as impulsive, hedonistic and lacking reflection on consequences:
“the partisan narrative stance speaks for a romantic vision of life’s possibilities; the
alternate stance for a realistic understanding and acceptance of human limits […] To
some readers, the sympathetic view speaks so movingly that they do not hear the
sober realism also richly represented in the novel” (Sullivan and Smith 156-157).

The narrative style used by Chopin is close to a musical structure of repetitions

and poetic language. It mixes realistic descriptions with repetition of key motives,
symbols, images (e.g. sea, nature, night, solitude, food, sentences, swimming,
music). There are scenes of lyricism, fantasy, and mythical atmosphere together with
more traditional, even satirical portrays of social realism. We find magical, mythical
moments of “epiphanies” in relation to Edna’s awakening through an impressionistic
narrative style that uses repetitions and narrative rhythm as music. There is a poetic
unity and organic essence in the narration that moves the plot towards Edna’s rebirth.

As Joyce Dyer argues, the use of symbols and images in the narrative
structure is not only an aesthetic or ornamental matter, but it complements the
thematic and content of the novel and Edna’s story. Without this imagery, the novel
would lose much of its brightness and density, and Edna Pontellier might lose her
chance of being understood. […] It is an essential artistic component. The book
depends on symbolism to define Edna’s psychological dilemma and romantic
sensibility; to explain the limitations and dangers of her new vision; and finally, to help
readers understand why Edna walks into the sea. […] Chopin’s symbols elaborately
and meticulously connect to tell the complete and complex story of Edna Pontellier.
(Dyer 126).

Form and content join in Chopin’s narrative mastery, since through the
symbolic images and repetitions, the author describes the psychological
development of the character: the quest for self-awareness and realization, the
search for freedom through art and self-reflection and the foreseen difficulties of such
quest. Chopin, as Dyer, defines her, was a “psychological symbolist” (126).
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 Chopin’s style is “distinctively poetic, visual, and sensuous” (idem.), as if the
language in the novel was opening itself to the reader at the same time as Edna’s
inner self and sensual body opens to her own awakening. The warm colors, the heat,
and the sea atmosphere of the Gulf coast become a propitious nest for this blooming
of Edna and the reader’s literary senses and sensitivity. The sea, as a main symbol
in the book, represents completeness, sensuality, eroticism and spiritual awakening,
and it includes the double meaning of rebirth and the immensity of existential death.
The sea appears at the beginning and end of the story for a reason.

The sun and the moon symbolize a bright understanding of a new self and the
magical and mythical atmosphere of Grand Isle, where ancestral spirituality also
inhabits and touches Edna to change her forever-- with the help of Robert.

The symbolism of spaces is important in the novel. The meadow at Kentucky

represents also the freedom of movement and being the sea provides Edna with,
joining the image of sea and earth. The city of New Orleans gives her the opportunity
to walk and stroll as a New Woman flaneuse. But it is equally important to be able to
understand, as readers the duality or oppositions concealed by the symbols. The
patriarchal house is a space of confinement for her soul, but the “bird cage” little
house is at the same time a liberation and the beginning of her end.

The bird is a symbol that appears as representing freedom from constriction

and achievement of the aim at independence. However, her back, as Mrs. Reisz
suggests, could not be strong enough to grow wings and it is present in the last scene
to remind Edna of this and at the same time of her eagerness to fly.

Flowers, smells, trees, food, awake in the reader throughout the novel the
predominance of the senses and Edna’s body. Music becomes a main path of self-
discovery, introspection and connection with her artistic soul.

Stylistic analysis reveals Chopin’s careful and masterful use of language

(lexis, grammatical structures, speech acts, narrative stance and figures of speech).

2.3. Main Themes in The Awakening

Solitude: The subtitle of the novel was “A Solitary Soul”. We could interpret the
story, more than as a romantic story, as a metaphysical quest, more a philosophical
than a romantic story.

Awakening: The book is full of images of “vision” and “space”, pay attention to all
the descriptions of eyes, gaze, look, etc. The sea is a symbol of freedom and
awakening too. Basically, we could say that three elements help Edna’s process of
inner awakening: the sea and nature at Grand Isle, Robert and romantic love, and
Adele and Ms Reisz. Adele represents the homosocial (homosociality means same-
sex relationships that are not of a romantic or sexual nature, such as friendship,
mentorship, or others) support for Edna at Grand Isle, representing motherhood,
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female understanding, the domestic woman and the equation of “love without art” or
love through the family but not individual and artistic searching. On the other hand,
Ms Reisz represents a different female model, the independent single artist, the
equation “art without love”: artistic and individual freedom with the punishment for
the woman artist of not being able to fit in a family. The first and second part of the
book oscillates between these two figures and equations but Edna finally decides to
refuse both models choosing death, which could be interpreted as a celebratory
vindication of her independent soul, saying: if these are the only two models of
femininity society can offer, neither of them is complete and fulfilling.

Romantic love: This is an ideal of romantic fusion that was in Edna’s set of beliefs
when younger and that is awakened at Grand Isle by the hope that Roberts
represents. It is an important element in her awakening, but it is an ideal that belongs
to fantasy. Edna seems to stay in this part of the fantasy and idealism, while Robert,
mainly in the second part of the book, becomes a more realistic character. Although
he is the engine for her self-awakening to romance, he is the one posing a break to
idealism, by his decision of running to Mexico or by leaving her for being a married
woman at the end. Also, it is significant that it is when they are both confessing their
love for each other when the news of Adele’s childbirth breaks them apart, it is
another element of realism that brings back the idea of motherhood and Edna’s role
as wife and mother. Romantic love is an interesting element also because some
readers may find this is in fact the key aspect of the novel, but is romantic love the
sole reason for Edna’s awakening or just an engine of inner changes that makes her
realize much more about herself? An excuse for finding herself, first critiques only
suggested about adultery, selfish look for self-satisfaction and the result, they do not
see solitude and search as the other part of the story.

Death and suicide: This is the most controversial moment in the book. Let’s analyze
what leads Edna to her death. First, the fantasy of romantic fusion is broken by realist
Robert’s goodbye. Second, the fantasy of independence is broken by Adele’s
childbirth, which reminds her of women’s bodily and social function, reminding her
of her own kids and responsibility as a mother. There is no way out for Edna, neither
for romance nor for independence, but she is giving up neither her independence
nor her idea of romance. The suicidal swim at the end of the book is ambiguous. We
never see her dead, she is active all the time. It is somehow a positive death since
it represents her will against society, it is also a celebration of femininity since it
represents the female body fusing with the sea. The last visions from childhood could
be interpreted as liberatory (the “meadow of freedom”) or oppressive (gender codes
of authority and their seductiveness represented by the cavalier and bees).

Transformation/Metamorphosis/Künstlerroman: A Künstlerroman is the story of

the process of formation of the artistic soul, Portrait of a Young Artist by James Joyce
is an example of it. It is a story of initiation and discovery of intellectual and artistic
sensitivity by the main character that grows from adolescence into maturity and
decides to become an artist. The Awakening is this story of initiation or awakening
on a woman that discovers her artistic and spiritual soul. The issue of transformation
and metamorphosis is interesting because it is one of the first novels centered on
female transformation and development of the artistic inner soul.

13
 Sexuality/Eroticism/Spirituality: Edna’s spiritual search is channeled through
eroticism.

LISTEN TO the following video to appreciate the acoustic dimension of the text.

The Awakening (fragment) by Isabel Castelao and Amparo Prior

2.4. Self-Study activities

Here are some questions or exercises to guide you through the reading and
understanding of the novel.

In no case should they substitute the complete reading of the novel. They do not intend
to represent the only approach or interpretation of the work. First, you are encouraged to
follow a critical reading of the book on your own, try to answer the Self-Study activities
suggested and find pieces of evidence in the text to support your answers.
References to pages are from Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Selected Stories.
Penguin Classics with an Introduction by Sandra M. Gilbert, 1986. This is a very good
edition and introduction; however, the novel is available as e-text at Project Gutenberg.

PART I: Chapters 1-16

1. What do you think the “parrot” symbolizes? (Ch.1)

2. Localize geographically the Lebrun cottages by the description you find at the
beginning of the chapter. (Ch.1)

3. Analyze the language used and the characteristics of the description of Mrs.
Pontellier’s eyes at the beginning of the chapter. What does it tell us about the
character? (Ch.2)

4. What do we know about Edna’s relationship to Robert Lebrun and her husband
by the end of chapter 3?

5. Why does Edna cry? Analyze the paragraph that starts “An indescribable
oppression…” (Ch.3)

6. What does the narrator mean by “In short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-
woman”? How is compared Edna and Adele’s approach to maternity in this
chapter? (Ch.4)

7. Describe how the society of Creoles are characterized in chapter 4 (Ch.4) and
what consequences these characteristics have for our understanding of Robert’s
intimacy to Edna (Ch.5)
14
8. Analyze the symbolic language used and the relevant event being narrated in this
chapter (Ch.6)

9. How is nature described, and the difference between their physical characteristics,
in Edna and Adele’s “walk to the beach”? (Ch.7)

10. Why do you think the author emphasizes Edna and Adele’s female bond in chapter
7? (Ch.7)

11. Analyze Edna’s assertion “sometimes I feel this summer as if I were walking
through the green meadow again; idly, aimlessly, unthinking and unguided”. What
is the paralleled symbolic meaning between the meadow and the sea? What is
she running away from as a child through the meadow? Where is this childhood
memory located? (Ch.7)

12. What is the importance of Adele and Robert’s conversation held in chapter 8?
(Ch.8)

13. How does the narrator portray the first encounter between Mrs. Reisz and Edna?

14. Analyze the symbolism, use of language and relevance within the plot of this
important excerpt in chapter 10:

Edna has attempted all summer to learn to swim. […] A certain ungovernable dread hung
about her when in the water, unless there was a hand nearby that might reach out and
reassure her. But that night she was like the little tottering, stumbling, clutching child, who
of a sudden realizes its powers, and walks for the first time alone, boldly and with over-
confidence. She could have shouted for joy […]. A feeling of exultation overtook her, as
if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body
and her soul. She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to
swim far out, where no woman had swum before. (p. 73)

15. How do you understand that this experience infused also in Edna “a quick vision
of death”? (Ch.10)

16. What kind of bond is created between Edna and Robert in the conversation they
have after the swim? (Ch.10)

17. How does Edna rebel against her husband and how does it make her feel? (Ch.11)

18. Analyze the symbolism of Edna’s rest at Madame Antoine’s cot at Cheniere
Caminada. The sensual perception of the body, the bath, the food, the room, how
does the narrator portray this scene? How is this related to Edna’s process of
awakening? (Ch.13)

19. What events wind down the plot from chapters 14-16, framing the end of the
summer and Edna’s stay at Grand Isle?

15
 PART II: Chapters 17-34

1. What is Edna’s first act of rebellion against her husband and domestic life once
the Pontelliers come back to New Orleans? (Ch.17)

2. Compare the description of place in chapter 1 and 17. What are the changes,
differences, and similarities? What does the narrator make the reader expect
throughout this part of the plot?

3. Highlight paragraphs that show Edna’s depression at this part of the plot. (Ch.18
and 19)

4. How does the relation between Edna and Adele change in chapter 18. Why does
Edna feel sorry for her friend? Analyze the last paragraph in this chapter.
(Ch.18)

5. Why do you think Edna leans on Ms. Reisz’s friendship in this section of the
book? How important is Edna’s decision to become an artist now? What’s Ms.
Reisz’s advice? (Ch.21)

6. Why does Edna’s husband visit the doctor? How is patriarchal authority
represented in this chapter? (Ch.22)

7. How does the doctor describe Edna’s change of attitude in chapter 23?

8. Analyze the figure of Alce Arobin. Why is he introduced in the plot? How
important is it to understand Edna’s change in relation to her sexuality and
sensuality? (Ch.24,25)

9. Analyze the conversation between Ms. Reisz and Edna when she tells her of her
decision to move and live alone. (Ch.26)

10. Analyze the image of the bird in chapter 27.

11. Why is Edna giving a dinner party? This chapter is full of descriptive and
symbolic language; analyze the richness of detail and the ritual implied in the
ceremony of the table, food, ornaments. (Ch.30)

12. Analyze the following paragraph, how is Edna described? What is the
importance of this event in relation to the whole story?

The golden shimmer of Edna’s satin gown spread in rich folds on either side of her. There
was a soft fall of lace encircling her shoulders. It was the color of her skin, without the
glow, the myriad living tints that one may sometimes discover in vibrant flesh. There was
something in her attitude, in her whole appearance when she leaned her head against the
high backed chair and spread her arms, which suggested the regal woman, the one who
rules, who looks on, who stands alone.

13. Describe the events happening in chapter 32. Highlight a paragraph that
expresses how Edna feels since she moved away.

14. What is Adele’s opinion about Edna’s decision? (Ch.33) What is the surprising
16
 even happening in this chapter?

15. Analyze the declaration of love and the conversation between Edna and Robert.
What does Edna tell him that he is not quite able to understand? Do you think
Robert is ready to assimilate and support Edna’s new independent self and self-
reliance? (Ch.36)

16. Analyze the importance of Adele’s childbirth at this point in the plot. Why do you
think the author chooses to introduce this event when Edna and Robert are
together? What does Adele tell Edna at the end of the chapter? (Ch.37)

17. What are Edna’s thoughts in chapter 38?

18. Why does the narrator return us to the geographical location and atmosphere of
Grand Isle? Think about the circular narrative structure in the book. (Ch.39)

19. What are her last thoughts and conclusions about her husband and children
before undressing at the beach? (Ch.39)

20. What is the symbolism of becoming naked in front of the sea? What is the
symbolism of the falling bird into the water? (Ch.39)

21. “The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring,
murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude” This is an exact
repetition of words found in chapter 6. Why do you think the author uses this
technique of repetition? What other elements are repeated at the end of this
chapter that have appeared at some point in other parts of the plot?

22. Analyze the very end of the novel. What happens at the end? What are your
feelings towards Edna as reader? Do you think this is an ambiguous ending? Why
does the book end with a faraway childhood memory?

 Guidance for answering the questions

PART I: Chapters 1-16

This part of the book is set at Grand Isle, the summer resort at the coast of New
Orleans. Throughout these chapters we see the process of “awakening” to self-
consciousness, sensuality and sexuality of Edna Pontellier, the heroine of the
novel: a process of inner vision through existential solitude and communion with
nature and love that will give way to the rest of the events in the second part of
the story. Here are some important passages in different chapters in this first
section of the book.

CH.1: Pay attention to the introduction to the description of the social atmosphere
and exoticism of Grand Isle.

17
  Our first encounter is with the “parrot” talking in French. What is the
symbolism of this first image? It is maybe a way to introduce us to the Creole
community, the fact of presenting the reader with a bilingual situation could
represent cultural exile or alienation. Could the parrot represent Edna
herself, anticipating her inner alienation as if her understanding of her
awakening paralleled learning a new language no one understood? It may
just represent the bicultural atmosphere of Creoles (French-American).

 Next description is of Mr. Pontellier: pay attention to the emphasis on his

vision and glasses, the power of male gaze, and how important the way
masculine vision (symbolizing patriarchal society’s vision) will define and
exclude parts of Edna’s identity.

 Pay attention to the way Edna and Robert are introduced in the book. They
are coming walking from the beach under a big white sunshade. There is
an exuberant description of nature and the presence of the sea for the first
time, our gaze as readers also spreads beyond towards the sea horizon and
the gulf.

CH.2: This chapter is devoted to the description of Edna. Pay particular attention
to the description of her eyes (in contrast to the description of her husband’s gaze
in chapter 1). So much emphasis on eyes involves the importance of gaze, vision,
the way to perceive the world and the inner self for Edna throughout the book. It
is through her power of “seeing” as a metaphor for “awakening” that she reaches
a new level of consciousness and self. In this chapter we also learn Edna comes
from Mississippi, not belonging to the Creole community.

CH.3: There is a quarrel between Edna and her husband that lets the reader know
about his attitude towards her role as wife and mother. Edna’s cry is an important
event, it is the first sign of her soul’s discontent with her situation as a woman. Her
cry in the middle of the night, inspired by the sea and nature (take into account
the presence of the sea as another character in the narrative) is described as a
release from a kind of “oppression”, maybe the first sign of her restlessness
towards awakening.

CH.6: At this point, the reader has been introduced to Edna’s close relations with
Adele Ratignolle and Robert Lebrun, the former based on female bonding
(although both women are very different) the latter based on sensual, spiritual and
romantic bonding. We have also known about Edna’s painting and her feeling out
of place with certain Creole cultural behaviors, above all in relation to intimacy and
the way they express affection.

 This chapter presents the first sign of awakening in Edna by following her
instincts and going swimming with Robert, letting her will free. It is a brief
chapter with a dense symbolic description of nature and the sea. The
harmony Edna is acquiring in relation with her natural surroundings and the
sea is represented in the narrative voice that for the first time becomes
poetic, musical, organic; as a lullaby that places the reader in an emphatic
18
 position in relation to Edna. Here are some relevant fragments:

In short, Mrs. Pontellier was 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. This may seem
like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight.
[…] But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and
exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish
in its tumult!
The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the
soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.
The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its
soft, close embrace. (p. 57)

CH.7: This is a very significant chapter due to the female bonding between Edna and
Adele at the beach. Pay attention to the sensuous description of their clothes, the position
sitting together, the touch of their hands, the complicity and intimacy represented by the
narrator, and how they are sitting facing the sea, that space of liberty that provides
freedom of thought.

 Edna describes in length a vision and memory from her childhood, how she was
walking through the tall grass meadow feeling free and escaping from mass—this
is a vision that will be repeated at the end of the book. Think about the parallelism
between the symbols of the meadow of her childhood and the sea at Grand Isle;
about the relation between the walking child opening her way through the tall grass
and Edna learning to swim in the sea, and how meadow and sea represent a self-
assertive environment against the constriction of a patriarchal society (as a child
symbolized by mass and family, at present represented by the cottages where she
becomes wife and mother).

 She also mentions her belief in romantic love and romance as an ideal that has
shaped and held her soul and personality until finding her husband, who was her
guide towards a more realistic way of living. Romance is a part of Edna’s belief
system that will be awakened this summer, as recovering a part that was hidden
or repressed in her.

CH.10: This is the chapter of the collective night swim. Edna felt deeply moved by
Mademoiselle Reisz’s music as a spiritual exercise that brought her alert and in contact
with her inner self and nature. Edna has been trying to learn to swim the whole summer.

 As the last stage of her “awakening” process, Edna finds herself able to swim
alone at the sea that night. The description of that night by the narrator is symbolic
and full of magic. It is interesting that it is a collective swim (they are all there, as
representing society) but Edna’s “transformation” or “metamorphosis”, which
occurs at the moment she is able to swim without Robert or her husband’s help,
is revelatory: it is a solitary act that represents the strength of her female soul
finding her freedom against societal restrictions and expectations. She turns
around and faces the horizon, moving ahead and away from them; however, as a
child who has just discovered how to walk alone, she feels afraid of the
possibilities of freedom and goes back to her husband.

 The night walk towards the cottages with Robert reveals not only their complicity,
19
 but also how they both understand the almost magical moment of what is
happening to both of them, and how he understands the importance of Edna’s
awakening. Somehow, Edna is not alone. The narrator impregnates the event with
an atmosphere of spirituality, magical and symbolic nature that is shared by both
characters.

CH. 12-13: These are the chapters when Edna and Robert go by boat to a mass at
Cheniere Caminada, an adjacent island. It is the first action and decision Edna takes
after “awakening” to her true self, the inner self-consciousness that she felt as a
metamorphosis the night before at the sea.

 Pay attention to how Edna is in connection with her wishes and desires. We are
presented with an independent and autonomous woman who decides before
everyone gets up that she is going to call Robert to go together to Cheniere
Caminada. She seems to be in control of her life and decisions.

 Once there, pay attention to the symbolic weight of all the events: her headache
at mass could symbolize her spiritual rejection of male authority through church;
her sleep at Madame Antoine’s cot has a fairy-tale sensual atmosphere: the white
bedroom, her loosened clothes and hair in bed—they are like rituals towards a
rebirth, symbolized by the bath after she wakes up, as a baptism welcoming her
new soul and self. She is in total contact now with her sensual and spiritual self,
she eats what and when she wishes, she leaves with Robert when she wishes,
she is freed from children and family.

CH.16: This chapter marks the end of the summer and the first section of the book. We
have known that Robert is leaving, and we start seeing signs of depression in Edna.
There is a relevant conversation between Adele and Edna that gives us light to
understand what will happen later. By now you should be conscious that Adele
represents the dutiful mother and wife, the kind of conventional woman who is happy with
the role society has imposed on her. Edna, as represented by the narrative voice, is
treated as a contrasting model of femininity to that of Adele’s, above all in relation to
maternity. In this chapter there is a recollection of a conversation between the two in
which Edna outlines her attitude toward motherhood within her new understanding of
herself. Keep in mind this paragraph to understand better the events at the end of the
book.

Edna had once told Madame Ratignolle that she would never sacrifice herself for her children, or
for anyone. Then had followed a rather heated argument the two women did not appear to
understand each other or to be talking the same language. Edna tried to appease her friend, to
explain: “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’s only something which I am
beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.

PART II: Chapters 17-39

This part of the book is set at New Orleans, in Mr. and Mrs. Pontellier’s residence. It
describes how Edna’s life starts changing due to her understanding of her new self and
her new awakened soul and how it crashes with society’s expectations. This new
consciousness of her independence leads her to take vital decisions, among which is the
decision to live alone. These chapters describe the development of her new life until her
20
final decision in the last chapter.

CH.17: This chapter opens with the description of the family house at Esplanade Street
in New Orleans. It starts paralleling the beginning of the previous section, with a
description of Mr. Pontellier at the house, instead of at the cottages, emphasizing his
possessions and controlling role within the family home.

 Edna dares to change her daily routine by going out of the house and not attending
the visitors. When her surprised husband asks her, she says she did it because
she felt like going out. We see a trace of liberty in this action.

 There is a symbolic crashing of the wedding ring in her room when she is alone
and looks for solace looking through the window at night. This can be interpreted
as a wish for liberation and escape from marriage.

CH. 18: In this chapter, Edna visits Adele’s family. At the end of the chapter, we find a
paragraph (last paragraph that starts “Edna felt depressed rather than soothed after
leaving them”) that is revealing of the power of her ability to see things differently. She
feels pity for Adele’s “domestic harmony” and her inability to feel “life’s delirium”. She
starts realizing that family life does not suit her soul.

CH. 19: In this chapter Edna’s husband starts worrying about her mental health, this
restlessness is somehow transmitted to the reader through different channels. Her
husband is more than anything angry at his wife’s decision to neglect her wifely duties.
We, as readers, are told by the narrator about Edna’s mood swings. In this chapter she
also decides to devote herself to painting as her own personal medium for self-
expression, as a way of taking care of her soul’s needs and growing as an individual.

CH.21: Edna visits Mademoiselle Reisz in the city. Her relationship with the pianist will
become central in the development of the new Edna in this part of the book. Pay attention
in what ways and how differently Edna was attached to Adele at Grand Isle and now she
is to older Ms. Reisz: they represent different female models, but both provide Edna with
female bonding and friendship.

 Ms. Reisz tells her she had received a letter from Robert from Mexico. So, Robert
enters the plot and Edna’s life again.

 Edna tells her she has decided to become an artist, Ms. Reisz tells her she needs
“a courageous soul. The soul that dares and defies”.

CH.22-23: Edna’s husband goes to visit Doctor Mandelet to talk about his wife. It is
interesting how Mr. Pontellier’s point of view represents or symbolizes society’s
discomfort and rejection in relation to a change of roles of women as dutiful wives and
mothers. Society’s rejection at Edna’s awakening is represented in the book through the
eyes of her husband. His decision to visit the doctor also represents how the society of
that time considered women’s attempts to stand out of their assigned roles as signs of
madness. However, it is interesting to see how Chopin decides to portray the doctor as
a sensitive man who is able to see beyond the surface, understanding Edna’s awakening
in relation to sexual and spiritual freedom—an opposite perception to her husband’s. In
this paragraph, specifically in page 23, pay attention to the emphasis on gaze and
speech: “waking up in the sun” involves the act of opening one’s eyes to the light.
21
CH.26-27: In these two chapters Edna matures her important decision of moving to live
alone at a small house (pigeon house) she has seen for rent. She has an income from
an inheritance, so she will be economically independent. Think about the reaction this
decision would have caused at the end of the nineteenth-century conservative society of
New Orleans.

 First of all, she tells Ms. Reisz of this decision. Think about the reasons why the
narrator chooses to let us know about this important event in the plot through the
conversation that Edna and the pianist have in this chapter.

 Ms. Reisz makes Edna confess her love for Robert. Then, Ms. Reisz understands
this is a big step outside society’s approval and compares Edna to a bird.
Comparisons with birds are recurrent as a symbol of freedom and idealism in the
book. She says: “The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and
prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings
bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth”. Remember this sentence to relate it
to another bird symbol in the last chapter.

CH. 30: This is an important chapter since it represents Edna’s “Ritual dinner” of
emancipation. Also, it is her 29th birthday, a symbolic age for literary heroines in search
of independence. Pay attention to the gathering at the table, the symbols of royalty and
ceremony we find in the luxurious ornaments. It is a special moment in the book that can
be compared with others such as the baptism and ritual sleep at Cheniere Caminada, or
the night swim in chapter 10. The author seems to mark Edna’s awakening process and
steps through symbolic rituals full of sensual elements. This is the ritual of her maturity
as an independent woman.

CH.31-33: During these chapters Edna seems to grow in independence, inner strength
and self-assertion, which the narrator describes as follows: “She began to look with her
own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper undercurrents of life” (p.151). The
stronger she feels inside, the more rejection she finds from society, through the figures
of her husband and Adele who considers her irresponsible and childish.

 In chapter 32 she visits her children and this is an important event; Edna seems
to get in touch with her maternal side again but the weight of the taste of her
freedom is heavier.

 In chapter 33 Robert appears and they meet at Ms. Reisz’s. They get together at
Edna’s new place and they declare their love to each other.

CH.36: This chapter is the climax of Edna and Robert’s love story. They get together and
Robert tells her about the reason for his leaving at Grand Isle: he was in love with her
but she was a married woman and she belonged to her husband. Edna expresses her
new self to him by asserting that she does not belong to her husband anymore. This is
an important and revolutionary assertion from a woman at that time: “I am no longer one
of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose.” This
idea is in fact too ahead of her time even for Robert (it also includes sexual freedom) who
does not seem to understand and be able to assimilate Edna’s new idea of
independence. This climax is broken by the news of Adele’s difficult childbirth and Edna
leaves Robert to go to assist her friend.

22
CH.37: Pay attention to the reason why the author precisely chooses this event (Adele’s
childbirth) as a breaking point for Edna and Robert’s story. This is, in fact, the event that
separates them. Edna parts from him to see her friend, but when she is back, he is not
there and will never return. This event is a kind of regression in the plot towards the reality
of women at the time (family roles and maternity). Even Adele tells Edna at the end of
the chapter to “think of the children”, to hang on her responsibility as mother and wife.
Adele’s childbirth breaks the atmosphere of the romance and idealization lived through
the previous chapter.

CH. 39: This is the final chapter and it is set again at Grand Isle. Edna returns to the
place where she started her process of awakening. The narrative voice lets us know her
thoughts and how she reaches the conclusion that she does not want to live for her
children, but that she now expects something else from life (remember her conversation
with Adele about “never giving up herself for her children”).

 Through a poetic language, the narrative voice describes the sensuality that
springs from the sea, the sea that represented freedom and that stood as an
important symbol of awakening in the first part of the book (in fact, the exact words
are repeated from chapter 6: “the voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing,
whispering, clamoring …”).

 We find the symbol of a bird with a broken wing: remember what Ms. Reisz tells
her in chapter 27, using the image of the bird to fight prejudice. This falling bird
also represents Edna’s failing at facing society’s disapproval (and Robert’s
disapproval).

 She gets naked in front of the sea: this is a symbolic image of true self and body
sensuality, a female self-rid of society’s pressures and expectations, standing in
communion with the immensity and freedom of the sea: “she felt like some new-
born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known.”

 Edna’s fear of the water is balanced through the image she recollects of her
childhood’s meadow at Mississippi, an image of freedom and rebellion against
society’s norms (remember the conversation with Adele in chapter 7).

 The thinks of her husband and children: “they were part of her life. But they need
not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul”, a goodbye to her
love, Robert and a recollection of her family and her belief in romance (symbolized
by the bees and the cavalry officer) are the last elements we know of Edna naked
at the sea.

Pay attention to the symbolism of the whole passage, the use of circular images that
takes us back to different important moments in the story, and the ambiguity of the end:
is she committing suicide? Is this a tragic or a happy and liberatory death? Does she
actually die? Do we see her drowning? What’s the authorial intention by portraying this
end in which we do not see Edna dying?

23
3. Literary Criticism

Once we have made a close reading of the novel, we will look for some interpretative
tools to continue our analysis. In this case, we are going to study Feminist literary
criticism, which will help us to uncover some of the main themes of the novel and
approach the novel from the perspective of gender and feminist theory.

3.1. Introduction to Feminist Literary Criticism

In order to be able to read and interpret a text from a feminist literary critical
perspective, one needs to understand the ideological and theoretical premises of the
feminist political and cultural movement, what it tries to analyse and change in
society. Most feminist objectives are transferred into the way we interpret texts, that
is, what we want to find in a text when we read it. Feminist literary criticism can be
applied to literary texts written by male or female authors, although there is a specific
branch of feminist criticism that is focused just on literature written by women, as we
will see.
According to Pam Morris, feminism is a political perception based on two
premises: 1) that gender difference creates a structural inequality between men and
women where women suffer a systematized social injustice; 2) that inequality
between the sexes is not a result of biological needs but it is produced by a cultural
construction of gender differences. Its agenda involves two objectives: 1) to
understand the social and psychological mechanisms that build up and perpetuate
gender inequality 2) to change these mechanisms.
What is literature for feminism? Literature, as you may know by now, is a body of
texts with aesthetic and social value, an institution found in the education and
publishing system, and a cultural practice that includes reading, writing, evaluating
and teaching the literary canon. Writing as a creative form can offer a singular vision
and understanding of human experience, deepening in our perception of social
reality. Literary texts, therefore, can provide with a precise picture of how society
works against women’s advantages. The emotional impact of literary texts can
generate indignation towards this social inequality, raising consciousness about this
issue. Positive images of women’s qualities and experiences can influence women’s
self-perception suggesting new models and generating authority and empowerment
(Morris). And above all, literature, as all cultural practices, helps create a human
imaginary corpus (the symbolic structure that underlies in Western society and
culture) that could build authority and an equal position of power for women. De
Beauvoir has already studied how the mythical and imaginary Western apparatus is a
patriarchal invention, she wrote this in 1949. Therefore it could be revised, rewritten
and modified (a feminist literary practice regarding this is “revisionist myth-making”,
for example, rewrite the story of the Odyssey from Penelope’s point of view):

A myth always implies a subject who projects his hopes and his fears toward a sky
of transcendence. Women do not set themselves up as Subject and hence have
erected no virile myth in which their projects are reflected; they have no religion or
poetry of their own: they still dream through the dreams of men. Gods made by
 males are the gods they worship. […] Thus, as against the dispersed, contingent,
and multiple existences of actual women, mythical thought opposes the Eternal
Feminine, unique and changeless. If the definition provided for this concept is
contradicted by the behavior of flesh-and-blood women, it is the latter who are
wrong: we are told not that Femininity is a false entity, but that the women
concerned are not feminine. (de Beauvoir 143, 253)

Literature is the only artistic practice that uses language as medium. Language
constructs gender identity through the formation of subjectivity and cultural
discourses. Therefore, this is a powerful and vital tool for feminist activism and
objectives. If women take control of language from a cultural and imaginative position
new meanings, values, discourses, ideologies and identities can emerge.
As Waugh says “the objective of feminism must be to break or destabilize gender
divisions and cultural binaries (woman/man, femininity/masculinity, body/mind,
nature/culture, emotion/reason, private/public). It must find a political language that
can articulate a radically different vision about gender and society”(144). Literary
texts are important cultural and creative practices to achieve this.
Feminist literary criticism believes that there is no art without relation with society,
that literature is eminently political, and that this interpretative tool helps reveal this in
texts not only as theory, but as an action and practice that generates an influence in
society. As Felski suggests:

Literature does not merely constitute a self-referential and metalinguistic system […]
but it is also a medium which can profoundly affect and influence individual and
cultural self-understanding in the sphere of the everyday, identifying concerns in
social groups through symbolic fictions and thus giving significance and meaning to
experience. (en Robbins)
Here is a text that can give you a general scope of the basis and variations
within feminist criticism. Remember the focus of formalists, New Criticism and close
text analysis that believed the text must be approached isolated from society, history,
and ideology. The criticism we are studying in this unit is a complete break from this
understanding of literature, as other kinds of critical theory during the second half of
the 20th century until our time. The text below will also provide you with definitions,
common points and differences between Women’s and Gender studies, theories and
criticism.

HISTORICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL CRITICISM

The formalist tendency to isolate the work of art from social and historical context met resistance in the last
decades of the twentieth century. The new historical approaches that developed out of that resistance
replace the reflectivist model with a constructivist model, whereby literature and other cultural discourses
are seen to help construct social relations and roles rather than merely reflect them. A society’s ideology, its
system of representations (ideas, myths, images), is inscribed in literature and other cultural forms, which in
turn help shape identities and social practices.
[…] Historical approaches have been influenced to a degree by Marxist critics and cultural theorists,
working within the realm of ideology, textual production, and interpretation, using some of the methods and
concerns of traditional literary history. Still others emerge from the civil rights movement and the struggles
for recognition of women and racial, ethnic, and sexual constituencies.
Feminist studies, African American studies, gay and lesbian studies, and studies of the cultures of
different immigrant and ethnic populations within and beyond the United States have each developed along
similar theoretical lines. These schools adopt a constructivist position: Literature, they argue, is not simply a
reflection of prejudices and norms; it also helps define social norms and identities, such as what it means to
be an African American woman. Each of these schools has moved through stages of first claiming equality
with the literature dominated by white Anglo American men, then affirming the difference or distinctiveness
of their own separate culture, and then theoretically questioning the terms and standards of such
comparisons. At a certain point in its development, each group rejects essentialism, the notion of innate or
biological bases for differentiating sexes, races, or other groups. This rejection of essentialism is usually
called the constructivist position. Constructivism maintains that identity is socially formed rather than
biologically determined. Differences of anatomical sex, skin color, first language, […] have great impact on
how one is classified, brought up, and treated socially, and on one’s subjectivity or sense of identity.
Constructivists maintain that these differences, however, are constructed more by ideology and the resulting
behaviors than by any natural programming.

Feminist Criticism
Feminist criticism derives from a critique of a history of oppression, in this case the history of
women’s inequality. Feminist criticism has no single founder like Freud or Marx; it has been practiced
to some extent since the 1790s, when praise of women’s cultural achievements went hand in hand with
arguments that women were rational beings deserving equal rights and education.** Modern feminist
criticism emerged from a “second wave” of feminist activism, in the 1960s and 1970s, associated with the
civil rights and antiwar movements. One of the first disciplines in which women’s activism took root was
literary criticism, but feminist theory and women’s studies quickly became recognized methods across the
disciplines.
Feminist literary studies began by denouncing the misrepresentation of women in literature and
affirming the importance of women’s writings, before quickly adopting the insights of poststructuralist
theory; yet the early strategies continue to have their use. At first, feminist criticism in the 1970s
regarded literature as a reflection of patriarchal society’s sexist base; the demeaning images of women
in literature were symptoms of a system that had to be overthrown. Feminist literary studies soon
began, however, to claim the equal but distinctive qualities of writings by women. Critics such as
Elaine Showalter (b. 1941), Sandra M. Gilbert (b. 1936), and Susan Gubar (b. 1944) explored
canonical works by women, relying on close reading with some aid from historical and psychoanalytic
methods.
By the 1980s it was widely recognized that a New Critical method would leave most of the male-
dominated canon intact and most women writers still in obscurity, because many women had written in
different genres and styles, on different themes, and for different audiences than had male writers. To affirm
the difference or distinctiveness of female literary traditions, some feminist studies championed what they
hailed as women’s innate or universal affinity for fluidity and cycle rather than solidity and linear progress.
Others concentrated on the role of the mother in human psychological development. According to this
argument, girls, not having to adopt a gender role different from that of their first object of desire, the
mother, grow up with less rigid boundaries of self and a relational rather than judgmental ethic.
The dangers of such essentialist generalizations soon became apparent. If women’s differences from
men were biologically determined or due to universal archetypes, there was no solution to women’s
oppression, which many cultures had justified in terms of biological reproduction or archetypes of
nature. At this point in the debate, feminist literary studies intersected with poststructuralist linguistic
theory in questioning the terms and standards of comparison. French feminist theory, articulated most
prominently by Hélène Cixous (b. 1937) and Luce Irigaray (b. 1932), deconstructed the supposed
archetypes of gender written into the founding discourses of Western culture. Deconstruction [we will
see this in next unit] helps expose the power imbalance in every dualism. Thus man is to woman as
culture is to nature or mind is to body, and in each case the second term is held to be inferior or Other.
The language and hence the worldview and social formations of our culture, not nature or eternal
archetypes, constructed woman as Other. This insight was helpful in challenging essentialism or
biological determinism.
 Having reached a theoretical criticism of the terms on which women might claim equality or
difference from men in the field of literature, feminist studies also confronted other issues in the 1980s.
Deconstructionist readings of gender difference in texts by men as well as women could lose sight of
the real world, in which women are paid less and are more likely to be victims of sexual violence. With
this in mind, some feminist critics [started focusing on] gender roles, class and race, interdependent
systems for registering the material consequences of people’s differences. It no longer seemed so easy
to say what the term “women” referred to, when the interests of different kinds of women had been
opposed to each other. African American women asked if feminism was really their cause, when white
women had so long enjoyed power over both men and women of their race and when the early women’s
movement [First Wave] largely ignored the experience and concerns of women of color. In a classic
Marxist view, women allied with men of their class rather than with women of other classes. It became
more difficult to make universal claims about women’s literature, as the horizon of the college-educated
North American feminists expanded to recognize the range of conditions of women and of literature
worldwide. Intersectional feminist criticism concerns itself with race, class, and nationality, as well as
gender, and the way these differences shape each other and intersect in the experience and representation of
particular individuals and groups.

Gender Studies and Queer Theory

From the 1970s, feminists sought recognition for lesbian writers and lesbian culture, which they felt had
been even less visible than male homosexual writers and gay culture. Concurrently, feminist studies
abandoned the simple dualism of male/ female, part of the very binary logic of patriarchy that seemed to
cause the oppression of women. Thus feminists recognized a zone of inquiry, the study of gender, as
distinct from historical studies of women, and increasingly they included masculinity as a subject of
investigation. As gender studies turned to interpretation of the text in ideological context regardless of the
sex or intention of the author, it incorporated the ideas of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s History of
Sexuality (1976). Foucault (1926–84) helped show that there was nothing natural, universal, or timeless in
the constructions of sexual difference or sexual practices. Foucault also historicized the concept of
homosexuality, which only in the later nineteenth century came to be defined as a disease associated with a
distinctive personality type. Literary scholars began to study the history of sexuality as a key to the shifts in
modern culture that had also shaped literature.
By the 1980s gender had come to be widely regarded as a discourse that imposed binary social
norms on human diversity. Theorists such as Donna Haraway (b. 1944) and Judith Butler (b. 1956)
insisted further that sex and sexuality have no natural basis; even the anatomical differences are
representations from the moment the newborn is put in a pink or blue blanket. Moreover, these
theorists claimed that gender and sexuality are performative and malleable positions, enacted in many
more than two varieties. […] Perhaps biographical and feminist studies face new challenges when
identity seems subject to radical change and it is less easy to determine the sex of an author. (Mays A14-
A16)

(** From the 18th c. on this feminist theory was influenced by Enlightenment and liberal
humanism. A foundational text here is Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindications of the Rights of
Women. Even before, Christine de Pizan, for example, in The Book of the City of Ladies in the
XV c. already presented this argument. The fight for women’s rights and equality in the public
domain will continue in what is known as the First Wave of feminism or Feminism of Equality
until mid-twentieth century.)

By now you will have already realized that feminist criticism is not a monolithic
theory but very versatile and evolving, self-critical and diverse. However, all “feminist
theories” including the modifications and evolutions of feminist literary criticism (as
we will shortly see) have a common basis of thought and ideological premises. Here
is a summary:

 COMMON POINTS IN FEMINIST THEORIES:

1. Women are oppressed by patriarchy economically, politically, socially, and

psychologically; patriarchal ideology is the primary means by which women are
oppressed.
2. In every domain where patriarchy reigns, woman is other: she is marginalized,
defined only by her difference from male norms and values.
3. All of Western (Anglo-European) civilization is deeply rooted in patriarchal
ideology, for example, in the Biblical portrayal of Eve as the origin of sin and
death in the world.
4. While biology determines our sex (male or female), culture determines our
gender (scales of masculine and feminine).
5. All feminist activity, including feminist theory and literary criticism, has as its
ultimate goal to change the world by prompting gender equality.
6. Gender issues play a part in every aspect of human production and experience,
including the production and experience of literature, whether we are
consciously aware of these issues or not.
(Purdue Writing Lab OWL- term “Feminist Criticism”)

In order to understand the intersections and differences between “Feminist and

Gender literary criticism”, pay attention to what one and the other look for in a literary
text:

 What feminist literary critics do:

1. Challenge and re-write the canon, seeking to rediscover women-authored texts.

2. Re-assess women’s lives.
3. Look at how women are represented by male and female authors.
4. Question constructions of women as “Other”.
 5. Look for patriarchal hierarchies and binaries in writing and real life, seeking to
dismantle them, (= uncover, make manifest, undermine, subvert).
6. Acknowledge that language ‘constructs’ social reality, making it seem natural or
innate.
7. Ask whether men and women are essentially (because biologically) different, or
whether difference is one more social construct.
8. Raise the possibility of écriture féminine (a feminine practice of writing) and of
whether men can practice écriture féminine too.
9. Go back to psychoanalysis to continue exploring male and female identity.
10. Look again at Barthes’ ‘the death of the author’, a notion which favors ‘subject
positions’ constructed through words; ask whether experiential subjectivity (i.e.
sexuality, ethnicity) should be foregrounded instead, as material, social, cultural
and historical realities.
(Points up to 10 modified from Barry’s book, p,135.)

 Issues feminist critics study in a literary text:

1. How is the relationship between men and women portrayed?

2. What are the power relationships between men and women (or characters
assuming male/female roles)?

3. How are male and female roles defined?

4. What constitutes masculinity and femininity?

5. How do characters embody these traits?

6. Do characters take on traits from opposite genders? How so? How does this
change others’ reactions to them?

7. What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially,
or psychologically) of patriarchy?

8. What does the work imply about the possibilities of sisterhood as a mode of
resisting patriarchy?

9. What does the work say about women's creativity?

10. What does the history of the work's reception by the public and by the critics
tell us about the operation of patriarchy?
11. What role does the work play in terms of women's literary history and literary
tradition?
12. What are the feminist poetics (literary devices and strategies), the elements
found in the text that the author exposes through her/his writing?

(Lois Tyson - Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, 2nd ed., 2006, in
Purdue Writing Lab OWL)
25
  What gender and queer literary critics study in a text:

1. What elements of the text can be perceived as being masculine (active,

powerful) and feminine (passive, marginalized) and how do the characters support
these traditional roles?

2. What sort of support (if any) is given to elements or characters who question
the masculine/feminine binary? What happens in the plot to those
elements/characters?

3. What elements in the text exist in the middle, between the perceived
masculine/feminine binary? In other words, what elements exhibit traits of both
(bisexual)?

4. How does the author present the text? Is it a traditional narrative? Is it secure
and forceful? Or is it more hesitant or even collaborative?

5. How are those gay and lesbian politics (ideological agendas) revealed in the
work's thematic content or portrayals of its characters?

6. What does the work contribute to our knowledge of queer, gay, or lesbian
experience and history, including literary history?

7. What does the work reveal about the operations (socially, politically,
psychologically) homophobic?

8. How does the literary text illustrate the problematics of sexuality and sexual
"identity," the ways in which human sexuality does not fall neatly into the separate
categories defined by the words homosexual and heterosexual?
(modified from Purdue Writing Lab OWL, term “Gender studies and Queer
theory—from the 70s on”)

 WOMEN AS READERS, WOMEN AS WRITERS, AND WOMEN’S

WRITING

Many of the previous notions found in Feminist Literary Criticism can be applied to
literature written by male or female authors. However, there are 3 specific objectives
that are related to literature written by women.

WOMEN AS READER
According to Elaine Showalter this aspect marks the first phase of Anglo-American
feminist literary criticism:

26
 The first type is concerned with . . . women as the consumer of male-produced
literature, and with the way in which the hypothesis of a female reader changes our
apprehension of a given text, awakening us to the significance of its textual codes . . .
Its subject includes images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions of
and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male-constructed
literary history. (in Bertens 75)

Within the position of “women as readers” feminist literary criticism works on

developing these following aspects. How do we apply feminist literary criticism when
we read literature?

1. QUESTIONING THE CANON AND PATRIARCHAL LITERARY

HISTORY: Where are women in literary history?

One of the most important aspects and objective of feminist literary

criticism is to analyze how the literary canon is created and who prescribes the value
and authority of literary works. This is crucial because the works included in the
literary canon of a specific culture will later become models and representations for
future writers and they will also be emblematic representations of a historical and
cultural moment. Why have women authors and their works been generally
invisibilized, silenced and excluded from the literary canon? These are objectives that
are achieved by a deep practice of feminist critical reading. The first step of
contemporary Anglo-American feminist criticism in the early 70s mainly contemplated
women are “readers”.

It also studied the history of Reception of works: how women’s works were valued,
received, and interpreted in the period they were written. Also how they were later
revised and revalued by women’s criticism. Regarding this aspect The Awakening is a
good example.

Part of this feminist criticism of women as readers studied masculine aesthetic values
and how creativity is understood at a specific moment in literary history. These values
have generally excluded women from creativity because the artistic act has been
related to masculinity throughout history and women have been seen as object or
muses for male writers and artists. The question then is, how did women’s works
undermine and subvert this patriarchal understanding of creativity? How did they
manage to become creative subjects and debunking their role of muses?

And finally, a specific worry of this first stage was to identify archetypes, stereotypes
and images of women and femininity represented in literature written by men.

Virginia Woolf, for example, tells us in A Room of One’s Own (chapter 2) that, in order
to answer this question the narrator goes to research to the British Museum. She asks
herself how women have been represented in literature, sociology, anthropology,
philosophy and literature throughout history. What has been written about them?
Reflecting on the results she finds she suggests that women are not seen as
individuals that can create anything valuable.

Battersby studies in Gender and Genius how the myths of creativity before feminism,
and the understanding of artistic and literary creativity, were related to masculinity and
to men in different cultural periods since the Greeks. Up to very recently, the
understanding of literary genius was based on the attributes of the Romantic hero, a
myth of creativity that exalted a tormented self, the disorder of emotions, and isolation
27
from society. This myth excluded women even if part of the characteristics could be
considered “feminine”, because those attributes in women were related to insanity and
not to a creative spirit.

A first stage of Anglo-American feminist criticism, called “Images of Women” criticism,

focused on androcentric texts (literary works written by men). Kate Millet in Sexual
Politics studied how literature written by male authors such as Henry Miller, Norman
Mailer, or D.H. Lawrence, objectify and portray women from a degrading position. It
shows how they perceive and represent women in literature. For her, patriarchal
culture is a political institution. The sexual politics of patriarchal domination is also
found in literature. She reveals how most canonical writers portray a male perspective
that she considers “misogynist” and that most people and women have been taught to
ignore. Miller, therefore, train women to “read” critically the represented images of
women in main narratives.

WOMEN AS WRITERS
According to Elaine Showalter this second step in the evolution of feminist literary
criticism focuses on:

Women as producer of textual meaning, with the history, genres and structures of
literatures by women. Its subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity;
linguistics and the problem of female language; the trajectory of the individual or
collective literary career; literary history; and of course, studies of particular writers and
works. (in Bertens 75)

This later stage proposed two main approaches to the literature written by women.
One was related to the socio-cultural and historic framework, with a particular interest
in the mechanisms of literary tradition. The other issue was related to aesthetics and
poetics, the way women wrote, if there were specific differences or not. The latter
was particularly researched by French feminist literary criticism.

2. LITERATURE BY WOMEN, RECOVERING THEIR OWN TRADITION.

What are the characteristics of the literature written by women? Is there
a female literary tradition?

Those questions above describe the main objectives of a second phase of Anglo-
American feminist literary criticism called “Gynocriticism” (explained in detail later)
that formed in the late 70s and early 80s. Feminist critics were interested in finding
out common traits in the literature written by women, in the same historical and
cultural period or in general. They wanted to study how their literature reflected
women’s real lives and their social situation in the period it is being represented in the
work.

Another important objective of this second critical development is to visibilize and

recover forgotten or silenced women authors and their work. With this, these critics
want to show that there were more women than it was first thought that were good
writers, deserving to belong in the literary tradition. Also, this also probed that the
patriarchal construction of the institution of literature (the canon) had excluded them.

Adrienne Rich does not only share the need for this recovering of forgotten female
authors through a method of feminist archeology, but she also suggests to “look
28
back” and revise the literary history and works women have learned from in order to
create a new writing. This act of “re-vision” leading to re-writing (not reading) will
provide women with tools to stop feeling unable to become authors and unable to
write, because this practice will help them find new sources of empowerment. She
suggests women writers should learn from past writing (male and female) and stop
falling prey of victimization.

Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text
from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is
an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we
cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a
search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated
society. (In Rich “When we Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”, 35)

Gynocriticism intended to show the existence of a literary tradition by women,

identifying the way they write or what they write about and marking their position in
literary history. It was made possible by foregrounding women authors’ contributions
and characteristics to strengthen female authorship and literary authority. To achieve
this, the institutionalization of the authorship of women writers and their work was
needed, so they could then become new models for future women writers, building a
continuum of a female literary tradition. Thus, women writers will have literary
mothers to look back at.

As Rooney suggests, this feminist criticism not only tries to create the possibility of a
new literary tradition or a kind of contra-canon to the one institutionalized as
normative, but also contributes to disrupt the very idea of canon, because it questions
its origin and structure.

Are there any common elements in the way women write or in what they write about?
These critics start with this hypothesis analyzing how women, in general, show a
greater interest in writing about experiences mainly lived by women up to
contemporary times (maternity, marriage, conflict with creativity, subjugation to
patriarchal domination, love, relation to nature, consciousness of the body, etc.) Up to
the 60s or 70s (the upheaval of the feminist movement) this was a way to undermine
and subvert the obstacles to their creativity installed by a patriarchal model of
authorship and literary value, which considered these were not literary topics. For
example, in the 19th century women authors, as some critics have studied, used a
poetics of ambivalence and duplicity, armoring their message so it was not clearly
exposed. Literary strategies such as irony, word play, a timid self or language
ambiguity in fact hid an empowering questioning of rules and self-representation (an
example of this is Emily Dickinson).

Some other aspects feminist literary criticism at this point studied was, for example,
the relation between gender and genre. Is there any specific genre women preferred
to write in some particular historical period? It is extensively probed that the rise of
the novel as entertainment in the 19th c. came by the hand of women authors, who
were experts in emotions, romance and the intimate side of human nature. Poetry, for
example, was a preferred genre in the feminist movement period in order to vindicate
female experiences and voices through the expression of self-assertion.

Finally, the study of writing as a profession in relation to women was also reviewed,
their participation in the literary career. When did they start writing professionally?
Was Kate Chopin a professional writer?

29
As Virginia Woolf advised women writers, in order to be able to write they needed
first adequate material conditions (space and time; money), they needed “a room of
one’s own”. She also referred to a psychological space, for reflecting, learning and
creating without interference and with the help of models to look back at. The
importance of the acknowledgement of a female literary tradition is found in her idea
that “we have to think back through our mothers”.

Without those forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no
more have written than Shakespeare could have written without Marlow, or Marlowe
without Chaucer…For masterpieces are not single and solitary birds; they are the
outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so
that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice…Indeed, since freedom and
fullness of expression are of the essence of the art, such a lack of tradition such a
scarcity and inadequacy of tools, must have tolled enormously upon the writing of
women.

Alice Walker is one of the first to claim the importance of recuperating and studying
previous women writers and their works as past models for black feminist writers in
her pioneering work In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.

Even though it seems a long way, feminist literary criticism has done the work of
building a tradition of literature by women for less than a century now.

WOMEN’S WRITING
3. LITERARY CREATIVITY AND POETICS. How do women write? What
is the relation between gender and literary language?

A big effort has been devoted by feminist literary critics to study whether there are
particular aesthetic elements in women’s writing. They tried to find out if there are
common creative strategies in their style and the use of literary language. The ways
literature and literary language works, their characteristics and systems are called
“poetics”.

One of the main issues in this aspect has been to figure out whether there are
singular literary creative mechanisms in women authors, or characteristics of a
feminine literary creativity or a feminist poetics that can be deployed by women or
men authors alike.

Through the study of women’s literary texts we may appreciate elements of a

feminine aesthetics that give voice and presence to a female imagination and
perception of the world in the literary discourse. What are these elements and
characteristics? Through the use of particular literary strategies women authors may
undermine the patriarchal assumptions about women and the normative and
acceptable literary way of writing.

Rooney says that one of the objectives of feminist criticism and women’s literature
should be to criticize and disrupt hegemonic and normative aesthetic values (a style
we consider normal, prescriptive, acceptable); also to foreground what is considered
minor genres (autobiography, diaries, testimonial literature, letters, memoirs); and
finally, to promote an avant-garde style and experimental literature that disrupt
accepted uses of narrative, poetic and dramatic language (e.g. writing against a
logical narrative sequence).
30
In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf already suggested that the main
characteristic that showed that contemporary women writers started to write away
from victimization and in their own terms, finding a voice and language of their own in
literature was that “they broke the sentences, and then they broke the sequence”.
This means that finding their own literary style may imply the use of a singular
rhythm, cadence and tone; a particular use of language and literary strategies. Also,
Woolf insists that new ideas about women’s lives and emotions should shock the
reader so the classical representations of women are shaken (more on this below).

French feminist literary critics, such as Helen Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva
have treated this issue from a psychoanalytical and poststructuralist perspective.
Their approach is very different to Anglo-American gynocriticism and its objective was
not to see women writers in relation to literary history and the reflection of their
position and experience in society within literary texts. They approached women’s
identity and femininity as constructions created from cultural discourses and
language. For these critics, and other feminists from the 1990s on, the self or subject
is not a unitary concept but multiple, fragmented, embodied and moving in a process
beyond patriarchal binaries.

Cixous coined the concept of “écriture féminine” in order to define how women could
recover a style of writing that had been blocked in them and that is primarily in
contact with the body.

The call for a feminine literature, écriture féminine, that “writes the body” by imitating
the rhythms and sexuality of women. Disrupting conventional narrative, this writing is
nonlinear, polyphonic, open-ended, subverts hegemonic forms. (Cixous in Friedman
and Fuchs)

I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self:
must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven
away as violently as from their bodies. (Cixous in Wharhol and Price134)

Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language
that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes. (Cixous in
Marks and Courtivron)

We haven´t been taught, nor allowed, to express multiplicity. To do that is to speak

improperly. Of course, we might—we were supposed to?—exhibit one “truth” while
sensing, withholding, muffling another. (Irigaray in Wharhol and Price 351)

Cixous also signals a basic notion in feminist writing and women’s discourse, that
focus on disrupting the binaries that have regulated patriarchal discourse and culture.
This logic works through opposition, understanding, as de Beauvoir suggests, one
side of the opposite as dominating in the hierarchy. Where do you think “the
feminine” is placed in the following imaginary and cultural binaries?

Where is she?
Activity/Passivity
Sun/Moon
Culture/Nature
[Mind/Body]
Day/Night
If we read or speak, the same thread is leading us through literature, philosophy,
criticism, centuries of representation and reflection. Thought has always worked
through opposition. Organization by hierarchy makes all conceptual organization
31
 subject to man. Male privilege, shown in the opposition between activity and passivity,
which he uses to sustain himself. (Cixous)

The proposition of women’s writing, a female imaginary and understanding of one’s

position, according to these critics, is not on one side or the other but on the border
or on none or on the mixing of both opposites or binaries. They advocate multiplicity,
irreverence, and a new logic, principally based on the body.

According to Kaplan one of the main elements of women’s narratives and aesthetics
is precisely the right of access to language and creativity in a patriarchal culture. She
describes it as the “profound split” in subjectivity that is reflected in style and content.

A very high proportion of women’s poems are about the right to speak and write. The
desire to write imaginative poetry and prose was and is a demand for access to and
parity withing the law and myth-making groups of society … To be a woman and a poet
presents many women poets with such a profound split between their social sexual
identity (their “human” identity) and their artistic practice that the split becomes the
insistent subject, sometimes overt, often hidden or displaced, of much women’s poetry.
(Kaplan)

Kristeva considers that women’s literature suggests a use of narrative time that is not
linear but cyclical, a constant return instead of a linear sequence from beginning to
end.

The two types of temporality—cyclical and monumental—are traditionally associated

with female subjectivity, when female subjectivity is considered to be innately maternal.
We must not forget, however, that repetition and eternity serve as fundamental
conceptions of time in numerous experiences, notably mystical ones … On the other
hand, female subjectivity poses a problem only with respect to a certain conception of
time, that of time as planning, as teleology, as linear and prospective development—the
time of history. This sort of time is that of language, of the enunciation of sentences
(noun phrase and verb phrases, linguistic topic and comment, beginning and end).
(Kristeva in Warhol and Price 443)

KEY CONCEPTS in Feminist Literary Criticism

PATRIARCHY

The idea of patriarchy refers to a social order in which there is recurrent and
systematic domination of men over subordinated women across a wide range of
social institutions and practices. The term gained currency during the second wave of
the women’s movement dating from the 1960s, clearly carries the connotations of the
male-headed family, mastery and superiority. As such, the concept of patriarchy
asserts that sex is a central organizing principle of social life where gender relations
are thoroughly saturated with power.
Many feminists have argued that contemporary sexed subjectivities are not universals
but rather the consequence of the relations between men and women that are formed
in the context of patriarchal arrangements which, if challenged, could be changed.
From a psychoanalytical point of view, patriarchy provides the context in which
through the identification with the father and symbolic Phallus as the domain of social
status, power and independence boys take on a form of externally oriented
masculinity achieved at the price of emotional dependence on women. In contrast,
while girls acquire a greater surety with the communicative skills of intimacy through
introjection of, and identification with, aspects of their mothers’ own narratives, they
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have greater difficulty with externally oriented autonomy.
A criticism of the concept of patriarchy is its treatment of the category of woman as an
undifferentiated one. That is, all women are taken to share something fundamental in
common in contrast to all men. Thus it can be argued that the concept obscures the
differences between individual women and their particularities in favour of an all-
embracing universal form of oppression. Not only do all women appear to be
oppressed in the same way but also there is a tendency to represent them as
helpless and powerless. (Barker 142)

THE OTHER

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or

economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society. […]
The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as
on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two
electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by
the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman
represents only the negative […] Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in
herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being …She is
defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is
the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the
Absolute—she is the Other. (de Beauvoir)

Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is the first contemporary philosophical,

cultural and sociological study about women throughout history. It starts a second
wave of feminist theory by understanding that gender is a construct and by debunking
the idea that the “self” is a unitary, essential, natural and complete concept related to
identity. What is a woman? The answer to this question is not in biology but in the
way culture and other patriarchal systems have made her perceive herself, her
subjectivity, and her position as a “Second Sex”. What has made women to be placed
on a second position in the history of humanity? There is nothing in women per se
that makes her become “second”, it has been a male discourse in history, science
and philosophy that has relegated Women to “the Other”.

If the masculine is the self, the subject, the female becomes the other, the object
(both are fictions). If the masculine is the neutral/positive pole, representative of
humanity, the feminine becomes the marked negative pole. The otherness and
alterity is a fundamental category of Western thought, the Other is necessary for the
One to exist. Women have been represented as the Other in literature.
For de Beauvoir there is a constant hostility of power domination and submission
between the one and the other, and within the Other we could include not only
women but all minority groups in the margins.

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

This seminal book was a speech given by Woolf to the women of a prestigious female
university in England. At some point Woolf says: “But, you may say, we asked you to
speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I
will try to explain”. A Room, was written to encourage young women writers and
academic students and it wanted to generate debate on certain issues on women and
writing never raised before, issues whose delicate public controversy she was aware
of. This essay is probably the first serious intellectual account to be published on
literature and gender.

33
 Woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction … I pondered
what effect poverty has on the mind …and of the safety and prosperity of the one sex
and the poverty and insecurity of the other and of the effect of tradition and of the lack
of tradition upon the mind of a writer…What a change of temper a fixed income will
bring about … I need not hate any man, he cannot hurt me. I need not fatter any man,
he has nothing to give me…In a hundred years, I thought, reading my own doorstep,
women will have ceased to be the protected sex. (chapter 2)

Another important idea we find in Woolf is that of the “looking glass”.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and
delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size…That serves to
explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain
how restless they are under her criticism…For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in
the looking-glass shrinks…Under the spell of that illusion, I thought, looking out the
window, half the people on the pavement are striding to work” (chapter 2).

Woolf emphasized the notion that women writers should have a room of their own
also in the psychic space of their creativity, being on their own without the
interference of voices that come from male literary tradition, or the perspectives of
herself she finds in the representations of women there. But more importantly women
would be able to write good fiction, to get in contact with their creativity, if they write
without anger and without the objective and effort of confronting all those aspects of
oppression.

Here is a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without
fear, without protest …That was how Shakespeare wrote…They wrote as women write,
not as men write….They alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal
pedagogue—write this, think that. They alone were deaf to that persistent voice. She
may be beginning to use writing as an art, not as a method of self-expression.

The way Woolf describes writing by women is contained in the phrase “first she broke
the sentence, then she broke the sequence”. Studying the narrative and the literary
language of a hypothetical woman writer she realizes what she thinks is singular in
her writing: a particular use of language away from the masculine logic of discourse
and fiction, a different approach to the description of the “self” and subjectivity and the
revealing of experiences and topics of women’s lives that have been ignored before.

So I tried a sentence or two on my tongue. Soon it was obvious that something was not
quite in order. The smooth gliding of sentence after sentence was interrupted.
Something tore, something scratched; a single word here and there flashed its torch in
my eye…Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—“Chloe like
Olivia…” Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that
these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women…Chloe liked Olivia
perhaps for the first time in literature. For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael [the
writer] knows how to express it she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody
has yet been. (chapter 5)

In order to explain the difference she perceives in women writers in relation to

subjectivity and the “self”, Woolf describes the “self/I” she can read in a piece of
writing by a male author:

After reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a
straight bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter “I”. One began dodging this way
and that to catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it. Whether that was indeed a tree
or a woman walking I was not quite sure. Back one was always hailed to the letter “I”.
One began to be tired of “I”. (chapter 6)
34
GYNOCRITICISM

Elaine Showalter describes “Gynocriticism,” a second step in the evolution of feminist

literary criticism this way:

Feminist criticism has gradually shifted its center from revisionary reading to a
sustained investigation of literature by women. The second mode of feminist criticism
engendered by this process is the study of women as writers, and its subjects are the
history, styles, themes, genres and structures of writing by women; the
psychodynamics of female creativity; the trajectory of the individual and collective
female career; and the evolution and laws of a female literary tradition. No English term
exists for such a specialized critical discourse, and so I have invented the term
“gynocritics”. How can we constitute women as a distinct literary group? What is the
difference of women’s writing? (in “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” )

This critic that coined the term “gynocriticism,” divides the periods of women writing in
Anglo-American culture in three. These systematic order helps build the foundations
of a female literary tradition.

First the prolonged phase of imitation of the prevailing modes of the dominant tradition,
and internalization of its standards of arts and its views on social roles. Second, there is
a phase of protest against these standards and values and advocacy of minority rights
and values, including a demand for autonomy. Finally there is a phase of self-
discovery, a turning inward freed from some of the dependency of opposition, a search
of identity. An appropriate terminology for women writers is to call these stages:
Feminine, Feminist and Female.(Showalter in Eagleton 14)

Here is a summary and the historical dates of Showalter’s three phases of women’s
writing: A Feminine Phase (1840-1880): writers imitate and assimilate the
characteristics of male literary tradition and male aesthetics; a Feminist Phase (1880-
1920): writers protest against previous models and want to separate from them
searching for their own autonomy; a Female Phase (1920-now): it starts in the inter-
war period when writers wrote about women’s consciousness and experiences that
could be represented through the strategies of multiple points of view or perspectives,
form and stance against a defined univocal self, and elliptical and fragmented
sentences and voices.

Showalter in “Towards a Feminist Poetics” considers that Gynocritics’ work is to build

a framework of analysis for women’s literature, so new models based on the study of
women’s experience can emerge instead of masculinist models and theories. It starts
the moment that we get rid of masculine literary history and we focus on the visible
world of women’s culture. It seeks to visibilize the experience of the other half of
society through the feminist investigation of history, anthropology, psychology and
sociology. These are fields that have developed hypotheses about a subculture of
women alone, which includes the interiorized constructs of femininity and also
women’s occupations, interactions and consciousness. The anthropological
perspective also studies the relationship between women with other women, women’s
sexuality and reproduction, ideas about the body, myths, rites of passage, so they
can show that female values subvert and undermine the masculine systems where
they are contained (in Eagleton 254).

 Study activites (not compulsory)

35
1. What do you think are the aspects that could make a literary work valued
or discarded? How do we call the group of literary works that are
institutionalized to represent a culture and a socio-historical period in
particular?

2. Think about the differences between the adjectives: female, feminist and
feminine, and the way they are used throughout this document.

3. What are the objectives of Gynocriticism?

4. Describe the two aspects of research feminist literary criticism focused

on related to women as writers.

5. Research on when women became professional writers; was Kate

Chopin considered one?

6. How does a female literary tradition relate to the “anxiety of authorship”

(following reading in Critical Authors?)

7. Search for a definition of aesthetics and poetics.

8. What phase of Showalter’s system of women’s writing do The Awakening

belong to?

9. Do you find any similarity between Virginia Woolf’s search in the British
Museum and Simone de Beauvoir’s book?

10. How could you apply Virginia Woolf’s ideas of a room of one’s own to
Edna Pontellier?

11. Define the terms and concepts you find highlighted in the section
“Common Space in Feminist Theories.”

12. Find out masculine and feminine stereotypes. What constitutes

normative femininity and masculinity? How Edna Pontellier fits into them?

13. Could you answer some of the questions found in “Issues feminist
critics study in a literary text” in relation to The Awakening?

14. Why do you think the premises of Gynocriticism can be seen as

universalizing, ethnocentric and exclusive?

36
 3.2. Critical authors

SANDRA M. GILBERT (b. 1936) and SUSAN GUBAR (b. 1944).

The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan

Gubar's critical study of British and American nineteenth-
century women's literature, attempts to define a "distinctively
female literary tradition." The authors also try to unearth
significant women's literature and rescue previously
disregarded women's history. Gilbert and Gubar's analysis of
authors such as Jane Austen, Emily and Charlotte Brontë,
George Eliot, Mary Shelley, and Emily Dickinson signals a
shift in literary studies from examining how male authors
write female characters toward a definition of female
authorship, or how women authors construct female
characters. Gilbert and Gubar take into account the cultural
and political climate in which those authors wrote as well as
the texts that those authors read. With those issues in mind,
Gilbert and Gubar explore "images of enclosure and escape,
fantasies in which maddened doubles function as asocial
surrogates for docile selves, [and] obsessive depictions of
diseases like anorexia, agoraphobia, and claustrophobia"
(Gilbert and Gubar 1979, p. XI). In some ways, Gilbert and Gubar contend, the trapped position of
female authors within patriarchal literary constructs manifests itself in the literal and metaphorical
enclosures about which many of them wrote.
The title of the book refers to the character Bertha Rochester in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
(1847), who not only suffers from madness but also serves as a double for the character of Jane.
Gilbert and Gubar contend that Jane's central confrontation of the text is not with Mr. Rochester but
with Bertha and her manifestation of Jane's emotions. In Jane's coming-of-age journey, she must face
oppression, starvation, madness, and coldness at each of the estates in which she lives and works. At
Thornfield, Jane meets her "dark double" Bertha, who acts out Jane's feelings of "rebellion and rage."
Bertha is the only true "madwoman in the attic" in Gilbert and Gubar's critical study.
Moreover, the authors explore the figure of the madwoman as a double in writings by Mary
Elizabeth Coleridge and George Eliot, for example, to demonstrate how nineteenth-century women
writers and poets employed mirrors to create the madwoman. These madwomen emerge "over and
over again from the mirrors women writers hold up both to their own natures and to their own visions

37
 of nature," and they appear "from a silence in which neither [they] nor [their] author[s] can continue
to acquiesce" (Gilbert and Gubar 1979, p. 77). The figure of the mirrored madwoman signifies a
strategy authors and poets such as Mary Shelley and Emily Dickinson utilized to represent themselves
as split or, more specifically, deploying a "female schizophrenia of authorship." This approach also
prefigures authors such as Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, and Sylvia Plath, who divide and project
themselves onto particular characters.
This groundbreaking book on women's literature drew on work by historians such as Gerda Lerner,
Alice Rossi, Ann Douglas, and Martha Vicinus as well as literary-cultural studies conducted by Ellen
Moers (Literary Women) and Elaine Showalter (A Literature of Their Own). Gilbert and Gubar's study
elicited a range of responses from feminist, literary, and historical critics, who have worked to expand
the field of women's literary studies. Source: encyclopedia.com

READ the following excerpt by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “Infection in the
sentence: The woman writer and the anxiety of authorship” in The Madwoman in
the Attic. The woman writer and the 19th century literary imagination.

What does it mean to be a woman writer in a culture whose fundamental definitions of literary
authority are […] *patriarchal? If the vexed and vexing polarities of angel and monster, sweet dumb
Snow White and fierce mad Queen, are major images literary tradition offers women, how does such
*imagery influence the ways in which women attempt the pen? If the Queen’s looking glass speaks
with the King’s voice, how do its perpetual kingly admonitions affect the Queen’s own voice? Or
does she “talk back” to him in her own vocabulary, her own timbre, insisting on her viewpoint? We
believe these are basic questions feminist literary criticism – both theoretical and practical – must
answer […].
That writers assimilate and then consciously or unconsciously affirm or deny the achievements of
their predecessors is, of course, a central fact of literary history […]. Increasingly, […] critics study
the ways in which, as J. Hillis Miller has put it, a literary text “is inhabited…by a long chain of
parasitical presences, echoes, *allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts”.
[T]he first and foremost student of such literary psychohistory has been Harold Bloom. Applying
Freud […], Bloom has postulated that the dynamics of literary history arise from the artist’s “anxiety
of influence,” his fear that he is not his own creator and that the works of his predecessors, existing
before and beyond him, assume essential priority over his own writings. […] Bloom’s paradigm of
the sequential relationship between literary artists is the relationship of father and son [and] a “strong
poet” must engage in heroic warfare with his “precursor,” for, involved as he is in a literary Oedipal
struggle, a man can only become a poet by somehow invalidating his poetic father.
[I]f we acquiesce in the patriarchal Bloomian model, we can be sure that the female poet does not
experience the “anxiety of influence” in the same way that her male counterpart would, for the
simple reason that she must confront precursors who are almost exclusively male, and therefore
significantly different from her. Not only do these precursors incarnate patriarchal authority […],
they attempt to enclose her in definitions of her person and her potential which, by reducing her to
extreme stereotypes (angel, monster) drastically conflict with her own sense of her self – that is, of
her subjectivity, her autonomy, her creativity. On the one hand, therefore, the woman writer’s male
precursors symbolize authority; on the other hand, despite their authority, they fail to define the
ways in which she experiences her own identity as a writer. More, the masculine authority with
which they construct their literary *personae, as well as the fierce power struggles in which they
engage in their efforts of self-creation, seem to the woman writer directly to contradict the terms of
her own gender definition. Thus the “anxiety of influence” that a male poet experiences is felt by a
female poet as an even more primary “anxiety of authorship” – a radical fear that she cannot create,
that because she can never become “precursor” the act of writing will isolate or destroy her.
SOURCE: The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2001) 2023-2035.

26
  Study activites.

1. Look up and give definitions of the words marked with an * (asterisk).

2. Give brief definitions or equivalent terms for the following terms and expressions. Take
into account their context within the passage. Remember to consult a good monolingual
English dictionary if necessary:
• attempt the pen (par. 1)
• kingly admonitions (par. 1)
• paradigm (par. 3)
• male counterpart (par. 4)
• stereotypes (par. 4)
3. Gilbert and Gubar discuss Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” (paragraph 3).
Summarise paragraph 3 which gives us an explanation of this term (maximum 5 lines).
4. The adjective Oedipal (par. 3) comes from the Greek mythological character, Oedipus,
the king of Thebes who married his mother and killed his father. Why do you think Gilbert
and Gubar describe the literary conflict between a male author and his precursors as an
Oedipal struggle?
5. Challenging Bloom’s Oedipal model, Gilbert and Gubar create their own term –
“anxiety of authorship”. Re-read paragraph 4 from: “Not only do these precursors…” to
the end and paraphrase their arguments (maximum 6 lines).
6. Summarise the text (no more than 20 lines), taking into account your answers to the
above questions.

 Answers

Unless otherwise indicated, all definitions are taken from Cuddon, The Penguin
Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (1977, 1999).

1. Definitions:

*patriarchal: adjective which describes a system of male authority which oppresses

women through its social, political and economic institutions (Maggie Hum, The
Dictionary of Feminist Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003).
*imagery: the terms image and imagery have many connotations and meanings.
Imagery as a general term covers the use of language to represent objects, actions,
feelings, thoughts, ideas, states of mind and any sensory or extra-sensory experience.
Image does not necessarily mean ‘a mental picture’.
*allusion: usually an implicit reference, perhaps to another work of literature or art, to a
person or an event. It is often a kind of appeal to a reader to share some experience with
the writer.
*personae: plural of persona [a Latin loanword]. In literary and critical jargon, persona
has come to denote the ‘person’ (the ‘I’ of an ‘alter ego’) who speaks in a poem or novel
27
or other form of literature.

28
2. Brief definitions:
• attempt the pen: try to write
• kingly admonitions: stern advice uttered by a male monarch
• paradigm: model, example
• male counterpart: male equivalent or complement
• stereotypes: standarised, simplified and fixed conceptions.
3. For Bloom, “anxiety of influence” refers to the (male) writer’s fear that his works are
fatally overshadowed –even ‘owned’ in some way– by those of previous (male) authors.
The author can only counter the paternal influence of (male) literary ancestors by
aggressively challenging and nullifying them, much as Oedipus ‘nullified’ his father.
4.The male author must “kill his father” in order to survive and become his own person.
Bloom’s model is inspired by Freud’s Oedipus complex. This is what Peter Barry says: “the
male infant conceives the desire to eliminate the father and become the sexual partner of
the mother. Many forms of inter-generational conflict are seen by Freudians as having
Oedipal overtones, such as professional rivalries”. Barry also notes the masculinised
prejudice of the Oedipus complex: “As the very idea of the Oedipal complex would suggest,
Freudian theory is often deeply masculinist in bias” (93). Bloomian theory, too, one might
add.

5. In response to the masculinized version of literary rivalry represented by Bloom’s

“anxiety of influence”, Gilbert and Gubar propose a feminized “anxiety of authorship”
which can be summarised thus:
Male literary ancestors are associated with the patriarchal attempt to define the
woman author, reducing her subjectivity to stereotypes (angel, monster) and her
potential to define herself. The male power conflict with a literary precursor does not
reflect the female writer’s sense of her own gender. Her inability to see herself as a
(hostile, aggressive, i.e. masculine) precursor, or other writers as models or counter-
models, therefore, leads to a fear that she cannot write, that writing will lead to her
isolation or annihilation.

IMPORTANT NOTE:
The information contained in these keys to the study activities is not supposed to
be memorised. You are supposed to develop your capacity to integrate this
information into your reading and understanding of the poem and use it in a
flexible way to answer the PEC or exam questions using your own writing skills
instead of word-for-word memorisation. These keys do not constitute a final
reading or an exhaustive commentary of the text. You will of course find further
nuances and possibilities in the text and you are expected to produce your own
ideas when discussing texts as long as they are solidly expressed and based on
the text itself (that is, looking for the evidence in the text that supports your ideas)
and a well founded critical reading.

28
TAKE PART in the “Discussion Group” actively sharing your ideas and comments (in an
economic and short paragraph).

29
 QUIZ
 ANSWER the Quiz located in the Virtual Course (Work Plan/Unit 2). The Quiz is
an exercise for you to check if you have assimilated the contents of the unit.

5. REFERENCES

Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory. An Introduction to literary and cultural theory.

Bennet, Andrew and Royle, Nicholas. The thing called literature: reading, thinking,
writing. Routledge. 2015.
Dyer, Joyce. Symbolism and Imagery in The Awakening. Bernard Koloski ed.
Approaches to teaching Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, MLA, 1988.
Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.
Norton and Company. Norton and Company, 1985.
Gilbert, Sandra M. “Introduction: The Second Coming of Aphrodite”, in Kate
Chopin The Awakening, Penguin Classics, 1986.
Joslin, Katherin. “Finding the Self at Home”. In Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the
Bayou, eds. Lynda S. Boren and Sara De Saussure Davis. Louisiana UP, 1992.
Klarer, Mario. An introduction to Literary Studies. 3rd edition. Routledge. 2013.
Mays, Kelly J. The Norton Introduction to Literature. Shorter 12th edition. Norton. 2017.
Papke, Mary. Verging on the Abyss. The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith
Wharton, Greenwood P, 1990.
Piñero Gil, Eulalia. Introducción. Kate Chopin. El Despertar. Cátedra, 2012.
Showalter, Elaine. “The Awakening: Tradition and the American Female Talent” in
Sister’s Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women’s Writing. Clarendon
Press, 1991.
Showalter, Elaine. A Jury of Her Peers. American Women Writers. Virago 2009.
Sullivan, Ruth and S. Smith. “Narrative Stance in Kate Chopin’s The
Awakening”. Critical Essays on Kate Chopin. Ed. Alice Petry. GK Hall & Co.,
1996.

6. FURTHER RESOURCES

KateChopin.org An extraordinary website with countless resources for studying the work
of Kate Chopin.

American Literature.com Kate Chopin.

Feminism and Feminist Literary Theory. Videoclass.

The Classical Feminists Tradition by Paul Fry. Yale University. Videoclass.

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