Conform or Die

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Recommended: Sexual orientation and gender identity in society

In the eighteen-hundreds, the dictatorial patriarchy coerced women into fitting the ideal image of a Victorian lady by imposing social constraints on them. Unfortunately, women blindly submitted to the confining terms and accepted the role of being an obedient hetereoexual housewife and mother due to years of psychological manipulation. Mentally enslaving women lead to the promotion of female oppression by psychologically conditioned matrons. If a woman deviated from the path that was set for her since birth, she would face extreme condemnation from members of her own gender and would be titled a social leper. This dilemma is examined in Kate Chopin’s feminist novel, The Awakening, which depicts the protagonist’s internal struggle between fitting in Victorian culture and accepting her homosexuality.
In Creole society, women were oblivious to their own subjugation due to years of tyrannical brainwashing from the opposite sex. Victorian men imposed on women that their “decree of fate” (62) was to marry a financially secure, hopeful aristocrat who’ll treat her as an invaluable object instead of a human. Mr Pontellier, the world’s best husband, valued Edna as “personal property” and expected her to be at all times, fully groomed, attractive, at his disposal (44). In order for this to occur, little girls are taught at an early age to consistently beautify themselves and “model their grace” (58) in order to attain a husband who prizes her artificially altered face and body rather than her mind and spirit. The seeds of oppression are so deeply rooted in Victorian culture that girls blindly dismiss their own “exceptional intellectual gifts” (61) and talents because essentially having a mind and a voice are unflattering to men who seek ...

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... and making strides in legislation, their progress to tolerance has been extremely slow with an abundance of setbacks. Even though Edna Pontellier has the option of coming out of the proverbial closet in the twenty-first century, that would not stop her from becoming another Jadin Bell or Jamey Rodemeyer, due to the fact that all three of them genuinely believed that the last resort to curing homosexuality is committing suicide in order to evade living in sin and against society. This proves to show that one-hundred and plus years since Kate Chopin examined the quandary of homosexuality in culture in her novel, The Awakening, the homsexual plight continues to occur and the socio-religious attitude towards them has not changed significantly since Victorian Era. In Edna’s case and for many other individuals who resonate with her, it does not get better, it gets worse.

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