The Lacanian Subject's Death And Rebirth: A Post-structural Psychoanalytical Reading Of The Awakening

Kate Chopin is a well-known American woman writer in the late 19th century. She is especially remarkable for the rich local colors and consummate psychological realism in her works. Most of her works explore the theme of love, marriage, independence and freedom and pay considerable attention to female existence.This thesis stresses Chopin's masterpiece The Awakening and analyzes the heroine's metamorphosis. Her mental metamorphosis is a process of pursuing the phantasm of her lost ideal-ego formed in the mirror stage, and one to construct a new identity and subjectivity by her resistance against her traditional female identity prescribed by the patriarchal society in reality. This thesis aims to demonstrate how patriarchal authority is exposed, challenged and subsequently criticized in the novel. The focus is on the demonstration of Edna's awakening and rebellion.In The Awakening, Edna's mental development perfectly displays the uncertainty and fluidity of self identity, which parallels with Lacan's theory of subject. Edna's mental development reflects her ever-changing attitudes towards her prescribed self identity and the symbolic order—from passive recognition to doubt, and further to resistance and subversion. In the meantime, the stage of resistance and subversion is also her reconstruction of a new self identity as a Lacanian subject. Edna's attempt to flee the repression from the symbolic and to turn back to the imaginary ends in failure at last. It reveals that, Edna's modern identification crisis is closely connected with the inveterate disease of patriarchal culture. By having her heroine claim assertive role, Chopin seems to refuse to submit to patriarchal authority, reverse the stereotype of woman as the object of sexuality, and de-mystify the roles of woman.Despite the fact that there have been many studies on this novel, researches by centering on the establishment of Edna's subjectivity and the analysis of her desire to explore the source of the heroine's metamorphosis are rather few. The innovation in this thesis is trying to dig out the sources of the heroine's transformation from the angles of identity, desire and subject. According to Lacan's articulation of desire as lack, Edna's persistent pursuit of self and her ideal-ego in vain reflects such an awkward reality as the lack of a satisfying female identity. To Chopin, reflecting the heroine's development is tantamount to mirroring the deficiency of a culture and its value systems. The quest for a lost ideal-ego identity expresses Chopin's interrogation about social culture as a kind of reflection upon the uncertainty of human subject. This new discovery also shows that the profound significance of The Awakening is already beyond the narrow limit of pure feminist works and has been raised to the level of how to regard the paradoxical relationship between human subject and the whole human civilization.