On The Awakening Of The Classics Of Kate Chopin Novel

The Awakening, a work by American woman writer Kate Chopin, tells the story of the heroine Edna Pontellier, who does not reconcile herself to the role of a submissive wife and responsible mother and pursues a life of her own identification. The novel was once dubbed a "spiritual poison" by many critics, yet with the evolvement of ethical environment and the rise of formalist and feminist criticism it was extolled and canonized.When the reception history of The Awakening is viewed, a relatively clear route could be formed:negation, affirmation, and sublimation. The adverse reviews by dominant moral judgment buried it into oblivion immediately after its initial publication. When formalist criticism became dominant in the middle decades of the twentieth century, placing aesthetic forms in the center of literary interest, study on literary appreciation of The Awakening prevailed. With the emergence of feminist literary criticism, from the early 1970s on, The Awakening had been rediscovered as a congenial text in line with the rich varieties of feminist theory.For cultural critics, our understanding of literary works fits within the complex web of competing and interactive cultures, and we can't understand a literary text in isolation from the web of discourses in which it was represented. Culture, which is constituted at any given moment in time by the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class, occupation, and similar factors that contribute to the experience of its members, is dynamically unstable and is ever growing and changing. At any given era, there are cultures competing and negotiating exchanges of power, with the dominant cultures in the foreground and the subordinate cultures in the background. On the one hand, the dominant cultures will exert their power in every possible area, including the domain of literary criticism, presiding the interpretation and reception of literary works. On the other hand, "Power does not emanate only from the top of the political and socioeconomic structure…Power circulates in all directions, to and from all social levels at all times". Therefore those subdued cultures will also negotiate with the dominant cultures, and to some point they may struggle to the foreground and utter their voices. In the domain of literary criticism, the newly crowned cultures will leave their traces by contributing new approaches in literary theory, and by re-reading literary texts.In the centenary history of critical reception over The Awakening, different critical approaches to the text concerned convey different literary principles and methods, different philosophical thoughts, and different cultural perspectives, resulting in even different meanings generated from different readings. Therefore, the chronological interpretative history of one single text sheds light on the development of cultural milieu and literary theory at different stages. Through the study of the novel's course of canonization, the study in this thesis directs attention to the questions of how cultural "power" shapes the interpretation and reception of literary works, and how cultural evolvement interacts with innovation in literary theories.