Chopin's vision: Interrogating gender roles of the Creole female
Description
Kate Chopin often tries in her fiction to articulate the tension between turn of the century social and moral strictures and the female's individuality. In this dissertation I show that Kate Chopin reflects and interrogates the gender roles of wife and mother as they are reflected in conventional cultural representation of both American and Creole women This interrogation reveals that the Creole female enjoyed some greater freedoms than her American 'New Woman' counterpart, but often operated within a stricter moral code; for example, the Creole female during the Victorian era would not have ventured to a ball or cotillion unescorted, while an American woman would. American women in the 1890's were even undertaking careers as physicians, actresses, singers, journalists, and painters. To distinguish between their behavior, I will depend heavily on conduct manuals for both traditional American and Creole females. These manuals contained lessons on how the female should behave in every conceivable social situation. The proliferation of such discourse by the end of the nineteenth century made it probable that a majority of women accepted the advice. The manuals' popularity warrants my attention to them in this study for their accurate descriptions of female behavioral norms The first chapter focuses on nineteenth century models for female behavior. After briefly examining Kate Chopin's biography, I discuss her childhood years at the Sacred Heart Academy in St. Louis, Missouri, where she was exposed to the School Rule or Reglement, a French tract outlining appropriate female behavior. Other models for American women in general and Creole women in New Orleans in particular demonstrate the distinctions between women in American and Creole cultures, which caused women in New Orleans at the turn of the century to place themselves clearly in one culture and not the other. Edna Pontellier's dilemma in The Awakening is that she operates in both cultures and finds the relationship between their freedoms and strictures ambivalent. A discussion of these conflicting and overlapping signals is the core of my work Subsequent chapters feature close reading of The Awakening to indicate Chopin's representation of the two diverging but ambivalent cultures in New Orleans and the transgressive behavior of her characters vis-a-vis those cultures. In particular, difference between Edna's behavior in Grand Isle and New Orleans, demonstrates both the overlap and the polarities between the cultures; these geographic boundaries form the framework for my study