Chopin, Kate - Martha J. Cutter (essay date 1994)
Martha J. Cutter (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: Cutter, Martha J. “Losing the Battle but Winning the War: Resistance to Patriarchal Discourse in Kate Chopin's Short Fiction.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 11, no. 1 (1994): 17-36.
[In the following essay, Cutter traces the development of Chopin's resistance to patriarchal authority as evinced in her short fiction.]
In “‘A Language Which Nobody Understood’: Emancipatory Strategies in The Awakening,” Patricia S. Yaeger argues that The Awakening describes “a frightening antagonism between a feminine subject and the objectifying world of discourse she inhabits” (211).1 This antagonistic relationship also is present in Chopin's short fiction, which depicts women's inability to voice their own experiences. And yet, although Chopin continually demonstrates the way patriarchal forces exclude women from discourse, a comparison of Chopin's early and...
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