The function of adultery contract and female identity in Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening'

Seminar paper from the year 1999 in the subject American Studies - Literature grade: 10 University of Cologne language: English abstract: In Kate Chopin's The Awakening sexuality love and marriage are negotiated in connection with the problem of a uniquely female identity which defies the ideas of Victorian prudery and seeks to represent the new woman. But what precisely is the nature of Edna's awakening? Does the novel really convey a feminist tenor and does Chopin succeed in exploring new cul¬tural and social options in the sphere of fiction? Three major aspects have to be analysed to il¬luminate this matter namely adultery the notion of contract and the question of a female iden¬tity all of which are directly linked to the organization and stability of society in general and in American society by the end of the nineteenth century in particular. Considering the ubi¬quity of adultery - seen as a transgression against the marriage contract - in nineteenth-century novels Tony Tanner postulates relationships between a specific kind of sexual act a specific kind of society and a specific kind of narrative (1979: 12) all of which here imply a defini¬tion of woman's role on a social scale.As far as The Awakening is concerned however the case is far from clear because society's ideological hegemony is significantly diminished though at no point relinquished. It is proble¬matic to speak of Edna's sexual liberation and emancipation for two reasons: firstly there are no restrictive measures or even social sanctions like ostracism and secondly the ending is too ambivalent to interpret it from an exclusively feminist perspective. Nevertheless Showalter is certainly correct in asserting that Chopin went boldly beyond the work of her precursors in writing about women's longing for sexual and personal emancipation(1993: 170); contempo¬rary reviews and the reception history as a whole supply sufficient evidence of this as well as of the thesis that