Gender Roles In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

A man cooks and it’s considered surprising to some people, but when a woman cooks it’s her obligation. Back in the old days, gender roles were enforced and were consider to be traditional in societies. Certainly, in the novel “The Awakening” the narrator creates many scenarios of traditional and inequality within gender roles. The narrator used the scenarios to show the standard gender roles in a Creole society. In “The Awakening” Katherine Chopin suggests that the expectations on gender roles limit and create barriers to an individual’s choice. “The Awakening” reveals information about the gender roles during the Victorian era, and how things around the society succeeded. This novel took place during the Victorian era, which was a time where

As it becomes obvious that Edna is unhappy with her life and what they expect from her. She has become a woman who is not devoted to her kids nor her husband as a wife or a mother should be. Her unhappiness with her life can be shown from pushing away her responsibilities and trying to find happiness elsewhere. Certainly, she has the affairs, however, she couldn’t get away from her marriage because divorce was unacceptable. All she wanted was freedom, but that for sure couldn’t be given to her. In the other hand, Adele was seen as the ideal female figure, although Adele “ is a great performer, overdoing her mother role while at the same time allowing glimpses of her true self to emerge from the role, and that self is confident, powerful, and sexual” (Streater 41). Considering that Adele has been overshadowed by her obligations as a woman in the Creole society because she herself has rebelled from the patriarchal ideology in some way. For Adele, she found a way and has for once a perfect marriage and is treated equally without no one realizing it. Therefore, knowing that woman in this society are trying to find a route for their freedom themselves. Allowing to show readers that gender roles have its own ways to

Perhaps readers can see that men also struggle with gender stereotypes since “Men, more than women, are thought to be agentic —that is, masterful, assertive, competitive, and instrumentally competent” ( Eagly par.5). Likely men were thought the concept to be a real man, however, their expectations as men are rigid and narrow. Additionally, there was very little information in the novel about the men’s resistance of the gender roles, although just as a woman refuses the social expectations of a woman, a man can also refuse the social expectations of a man. As gender roles try to create an ideal image of a person, but in reality, it is ridiculous to uphold these stereotypes for gender roles for both genders. In the end, the novel is fond of identifying that the men are stuck in their gender