The Awakening Feminist Analysis

LeBlanc’s Gender Criticism of Chopin’s The Awakening

Tomorrow marks thirty years since the Roe vs. Wade decision that gave women a reproductive choice in America. The occasion reminds me that women are continuously struggling to attain and maintain various levels of freedom. Elizabeth LeBlanc’s gender criticism of The Awakening---a novel published before women acquired suffrage---highlights one such freedom: the freedom to live on one’s own terms.

The discussion delineates how Kate Chopin’s tale of one woman’s “choices, actions and attitudes may be construed as the attempts of a woman trapped in a sexually (in)different world to reconstitute herself as lesbian” (241). LeBlanc clarifies that Edna is a “metaphorical lesbian” who “creates a narrative or textual space in which she interrogates accepted norms of textuality and sexuality and constitutes herself as subject” (238). The use of the word “trapped” connotes a state of being cornered, with few choices and at the mercy of someone else.

But once she was “initiat[ed] into the world of female love and ritual,” (247) she began “seeking fulfillment and selfhood” outside of marriage and motherhood (244). Her gravitation toward a woman-centered existence, outside of culturally defined spaces, is an act of self-reconstruction. For example, at the risk of damaging her reputation, she rejects the obligation of her social class to host ‘callers.’ This is a figurative loosening of the ties that bound her to a tradition of waiting for life to happen. She defies that tradition and, in doing so, restructures her existence as a