Chopin, Kate - Patricia S. Yaeger (essay date spring 1987)

Patricia S. Yaeger (essay date spring 1987)

SOURCE: Yaeger, Patricia S. “‘A Language Which Nobody Understood’: Emancipatory Strategies in The Awakening” Novel 20, no. 3 (spring 1987): 197-219.

[In the following essay, Yaeger argues that language, not sexual liberation, is the element that makes The Awakening a “transgressive” novel.]

Despite the academy's growing commitment to producing and publishing feminist interpretations of literary texts, insofar as feminist critics read Kate Chopin's The Awakening as a novel about sexual liberation, we read it with our patriarchal biases intact. Of course The Awakening's final scene is breath-taking; Edna Pontellier transcends her circumscribed status as sensual entity—as the object of others' desires—and stands before us as her own subject, as a blissfully embodied being: “… she cast the unpleasant, pricking, garments from her, and for the first time...

[The entire page is 12864 words long]

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