An Interpretation Of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening From The Feminist Narratology

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle to reconcile her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century South. It is one of the earliest American novels that focuses on women’s issues without condescension. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism.Many scholars and critics study the novel from various aspects, including feminist themes and styles, naturalistic and modernistic features of the novel such as the use of symbolism and images, etc. but not very much work is done about the feminist narratology of the novel. This thesis, based on the previous research of the feminist narratology, attempts to excavate the meaning of The Awakening from the female narrative perspective. The thesis argues that the narrative mode, especially the use of free indirect discourse, the narrative language form and the internal focalization in the novel manifest Chopin’s effort to challenge the male narrative authority and establish female writing style.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is an introduction, which mainly introduces literature review, the feminist narratology, the chief arguments of this thesis, the research method and significance of the study as well as the content of this thesis. Chapter Two gives a detailed interpretation of some characters in the novel from free indirect discourse. The third chapter explains the novel’s narrative language form. From the uses of bird imagery, the syntactic structure and the choice of words, this chapter shows Kate Chopin’s exquisite female writing style. While in the fourth chapter, focalization in the feminist narratology will be proved. And the conclusion summarizes how Chopin used female narrative strategy to establish feminist authority and deconstruct the male discourse in The Awakening.