Thinking, Awakening And Transcending

As an avant-garde woman writer, Kate Chopin enriched American literature with her own fluctuating destiny and her "untimely" thinking and literary writing. Her short stories set in Creole community of Louisianan won her literary fame and popularity. However, the publication of her masterpiece The Awakening was totally a disaster to her. This book received fierce criticism both from literary critics and public voices for its offence of the social morality characterized by rigid patriarchal dominance. Consequently, Kate Chopin was alienated from literary community, which not only terminated her literary creation that is in its climax but also facilitated the early death of a literary genius in agony and perplexity. After the burial of half a century, there came the revival of Kate Chopin with the uprising of feminist movement since 1950s, in which The Awakening was canonized as forerunner of feminist writing.My thesis is meant to begin with the awakening women in Kate Chopin's short stories, and mainly concentrate on the characterization of the protagonist Edna in her masterpiece The Awakening. Kate Chopin portrayed a collection of awakening women in her short stories, who experienced introspection and awakening at a different level concerning love, family, marriage as well as sexuality. If we compare the awakening women in Chopin's short stories to an embryo, Edna might impress the reader as a fledged eagle of the incarnation of all Chopin's awakening women. Just like an "American Eve", she fought against desperately the patriarchal dominance and challenged the true womanhood—piety, purity, domesticity and submissiveness—emphasized by Victorian-type society. However, her awakening undoubtedly was far advance of her time; her epistemological struggle for selfhood, her introspection on sexuality, her epiphany concerning Motherhood and Wifehood as well as her recognition of her struggle as the passion in vain, all of which locate Edna in such a state—thinking in perplexity, epiphany out of thinking and transcendence in epiphany. All in all, as the spokesman of Kate Chopin's awakening and awakened women, Edna initiated women's awakening and pursuit of autonomous identity as a woman warrior.