A Psychoanalytic Feminist Approach To Chopin's The Awakening

The Awakening is Kate Chopin's masterpiece. It depicts a middle-class married woman Edna, who audaciously bids defiance to the conventional morals and codes in order to pursue female selfhood and independence. The Awakening, published in 1899, was condemned by most of Chopin's contemporary writers. Chopin's works were banned and she was denied membership in local literary societies. After Being ignored about sixty years Chopin's The Awakening arouses the interest of the critical community of the late twentieth century, which largely argues that Kate Chopin was a woman ahead of her time. The protagonist Edna Pontellier is a twenty-eight-year old woman with two children. After being viewed by her husband as a bit of decorative furniture, a valuable piece of personal property for a couple of years, Edna suddenly becomes aware that she is a human being. Victorian society sets strict standards for the roles of women, specifically middle class women, as wives. Women often do not benefit from being married in many respects. Edna indeed has no strong wings to fly far away from her group, although she has strong intellectual awakening consciousness, therefore, she , after all, can't become a genuine artist because she lacks the courageous soul that dares.With enormous courage, the female protagonist chooses to embrace her nascent consciousness of her selfhood regardless of her inability to change the conventional social order. In this sense, Edna becomes a definitive frontier feminist.The thesis explains how the collective unconscious influences females'psychology and behaviors. Chapter One is the brief introduction of Chopin's life and her achievement as well as the psychoanalytic feminist theory. And the second part analyzes how the females lose their selfhood in family by using the mother archetype and attached status as wife. Chapter Three analyzes how the females lose their selfhood in society by analyzing embodiment of the collective unconscious of females in patriarchal society, the awakening of the women's consciousness and their seeking for selfhood. The last part draws the conclusion: as an attached group, the women suffer from patriarchal society's oppressions; some of them hate their being a female and alienate themselves from society. Kate Chopin calls on the women to respect themselves and pursue their own freedom and independence.