Voice And Authority

Kate Chopin, the American female writer of the19th century, established her own fame as a regional local colorist writer of the New Orleans by her writing of the short stories. Unfortunately, she was widely condemned by the public and the literary critics for the publishment of her second novel, The Awakening in the year1899. This book, as her representative work, tells a story of an unhappy wife struggling with the confinement of marriage and seeking for the freedom and artistic perfection of her own self. Critics of her time reviewed the book as morbid, vulgar and disagreeable. However, within a decade after her death, critics started to rediscover the values of her works. It took about seventy years for Chopin to be recognized as one of the leading writers of her time. Nowadays, The Awakening has been already regarded as one of the western canons.Since the1960s, numerous literary interpretations of the story have been conducted by scholars and experts from multiple perspectives. This thesis will try to interpret this novel from the feminist narratological perspective. It aims to reveal the tragic fate of women in a male-dominated society by analyzing the feminist voices of the three different female characters in the novel. Moreover, in terms of narrative voices it is going to make an attempt to illustrate how Chopin effectively employs the combination of the authorial voice and the communal voice to establish the female authority.The whole thesis will divided into4parts. The first part will be the introductory part of the paper. It will provide an overview of Chopin’s life and works, and also lay the theoretical framework of Susan Lanser’s theory about feminist narratology and narrative voices. The second part will be dedicated to provide the concrete analysis and interpretation of the female characters in The Awakening. It will focus on illustrating the different feminist ideologies reflected from the three different female characters of the novel. The third part will provide an analysis of how Chopin establishes her authority by the narrative voices to convey the feminist ideologies. It will consist of two parts:the first one will focus on the female authority based on the analysis of the authorial voice; the second one will concentrate on the analysis of the communal voice of the story. The fourth part is a concluding part. It will offer a summary of Chopin’s feminist ideologies and the narrative arts, which have been revealed in the book The Awakening.