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SANDRA M. GILBERT AND SUSAN GUBAR (ESSAY DATE 1989)

SOURCE: Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. “The Second Coming of Aphrodite: Kate Chopin’s Fantasy of Desire.” In No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, pp. 83-119. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Gilbert and Gubar offer an overview of Chopin’s place in the intellectual climate of her time and examine the feminist vision of The Awakening.

The radiant Venus of antiquity, the foam-born Aphrodite, has not passed unscathed through the dreadful shades of the Middle Ages. Her dwelling is no longer Olympus, nor the shores of a perfumed archipelago. She has retired into the depths of a cavern, magnificent, it is true, but illumined by fires very different from those of benign Apollo.

—Charles Baudelaire, 1861

Then to me so lying awake a vision
Came without sleep over the seas and...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Primary Sources
   1. Kate Chopin (Novel Date 1899)
   2. The Nation (Review Date 3 August 1899)
4. General Commentary
   1. Sandra M. Gilbert And Susan Gubar (Essay Date 1989)
   2. Rebecca Dickson (Essay Date Spring-Summer 1999)
5. Title Commentary
   1. The Awakening
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright

1. Kate Chopin
2. Feminism