The Caged Birds

This thesis attempts to use the feminist criticism to analyze the symbols and characters in Kate Chopin's The Awakening in order to probe into the oppression middle class women suffered in late Victorian America and their different reactions to these social and cultural constraints. After a thorough analysis of this novel, the writer of this thesis discovers that the value of The Awakening does not only reside in praising its protagonist, Edna Pontellier's awakening, but also in discussing the general middle class women's position in the patriarchal society that women are caged birds.The thesis is composed of three chapters, plus the introduction and the conclusion.The introduction gives a brief account of Kate Chopin and The Awakening, followed by the reason why this thesis chooses the present direction of the research. The most concerned question in this thesis is middle class women's position in the patriarchal society: Are they caged birds? Why do they behave absolutely differently in the same cage? Are solitude and death the only ends waiting for the awakened birds?Chapter One discusses the social background and explores the symbolic scenes about the caged birds in The Awakening in order to justify the hypothesis of this thesis: women are the caged birds in the patriarchal society.Second Chapter explores the two different types of the caged birds and the reason why they become what they are. According to Simone de Beauvoir, a woman is not born but rather becomes a woman, that is to say the society makes a woman a woman. In this novel, the society makes a woman a caged bird. No matter what kind of birds they are, all the women are oppressed by the cage (patriarchal society rules and culture).