The Narrative Technique Of The Awakening

Kate Chopin, born in St. Louis, Missouri was an American Women Writer. In 1870 she married Oscar Chopin, the son of a prominent Creole family from Louisiana. After her husband died in 1889, Chopin began writing fiction, an activity that enabled her to develop and express her strong views on women, sex, and marriage while simultaneously supporting her family.In her works, she successfully described the life of Creole and Acadian, so she was called the local colorist. And she was much interested in disclosing the problems of women's status and their lives frankly and sincerely. She portrayed two types of totally different women in her writing. They are the traditional women and the new women whom we have the chance to have a look in her masterpiece The Awakening.In 1899, The Awakening, Chopin's greatest literary achievement was published. But the immediate response to the novel after its publishing was overwhelmingly negative. It aroused great hostility among contemporary reviewers because it traced the psychological and sexual awakening of a young woman. The norms and values preached by Chopin in the novel were in serious conflict with the traditional ones. However, fifty years later, with the development of politics, economy and culture, some critics began to make a new assessment of Kate Chopin's writing, and they thought that she was a forerunner of women's literature and that she was entitled to an honored position in American literary history.Although critics have done a lot of studies on the novel, most of them are focus on its feminism respects. The special narrative techniques of the novel have attracted people's strong interests, yet few have done thorough upon it. This thesis is an attempt at making a relatively thorough analysis of narrative perspective, focalization, symbolism and characterization of The Awakening in the light of narrative theory. It is divided into five parts.Chapter One introduces the background information on Kate Chopin and her novel The Awakening.Chapter Two reviews a general survey about the criticisms and researches on the novel.Chapter Three introduces a skeleton of the basic theoretical ideas I would later employ in the thesis and discusses zero focalization, internal focalization and indirect free speech employed in the novelChapter Four focuses upon the important symbol images in the novel.Chapter Five investigates the characterization of The Awakening with the analysis of three main female charactersThrough the detailed discussion of narrative techniques of The Awakening in terms of point of view, focalization and characterization, the thesis comes to a conclusion that the novel with its delicate narrative strategies which help to deepen the theme as a perfect combination of both rich ideological content and delicate narrative form, The Awakening deserves to be restored and to be given its place among novels worthy of preservation...