Showalter’s Analysis of Chopin’s The Awakening Essay -- Chopin Awakeni

Showalters Analysis of Chopins The AwakeningIn Tradition and the Fe virile Talent The Awakening as a Solitary Book, Elaine Showalter makes a compel argument that Edna Pontelliers unfocused yearning for an autonomous life is akin to Kate Chopins yearning to write works that go beyond female plots and maidenly endings (204). Urging her reader to read The Awakening in the context of literary tradition, Showalter demonstrates the ways in which Chopins novel both builds upon and departs from the tradition of American womens writing up to that point. Showalter begins with the antebellum novelists themes of womens roles as mothersespecially the importance of the mother-daughter relationshipand womens attachments with one another and then moves to the local colorists of the post-Civil War who claimed male and female models but who wrote that motherhood was not a suitable partner for the true mechanic. According to these women writers, a woman had to choose to be either an artist or a wife and mother one negatively affected the other. The literary history then delves...