Power And Discipline In Carceral Society

Being regarded as"immoral"or"morbid", Kate Chopin's The Awakening was reduced into oblivion for almost fifty years, because it violated the modes and codes of nineteenth-century American society. Till the thriving of feminism in the middle of the 1960s, more and more scholars began to take a new look at Chopin and her books; they applied various literary theories to the interpretation of the book, such as feminism, psychoanalysis, reader-response criticism, etc. However, very few have investigated it from the perspective of Foucault's theory with regard to power mechanism. From the perspective of Foucault's theory of power and its disciplines, this thesis is to study the operating mechanism of power and its discipline and punishment on characters, and contemplates on the struggle against power.The thesis is divided into three parts.In the first part, there is a brief introduction of background information with regard to The Awakening, and Foucault's theory on power, knowledge and discipline.The second part is of core importance to this paper, including chapter one to three. The first chapter examines the background information which empowered men and money via the interaction of power and knowledge. This power/knowledge penetrates into every facet of society to have a hold on people. The second chapter analyzes the disciplinary management in the novel. It supervises women both spatially and temporally, forcing them to conform to the desirable norms of patriarchy and true womanhood. The third chapter concerns with the construction of a caceral society where with all-pervasive mechanism and various disciplinary strategies as regards women, Reisz and Edna, the representatives of new women's who revolt against the oppression, is doomed to get punished.The last part is the conclusion of this thesis, explaining the society depicted in Kate Chopin's The Awakening is a prison-like one that restrain people to comply with the disciplined society.