Gender In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

In the beginning of time, gender was distinguished that males were more powerful or stronger than females. Today, those unfair gender norms are still evident but are changing into new norms, where females and males are equal. In the article “The Masculine Sea and the Impossibility of Awakening in Chopin 's The Awakening”, the author claims about Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, “This study intends to argue and conclude that Chopin had this belief that the male socio-cultural formation does not let women experience freedom.” This furthermore explains that in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, the main female characters, Edna and Jane, represent the difference in gender, suggesting females are overpowered …show more content…
This is due to the differences in gender where one gender seems more negative than the other, in this case males being more prevalent than women. The novel setting is an important factor relating to the difference in gender because the norms were different from the present day. It was common for men to be distinguished as strong and powerful while women were weak and delicate. Hence, both main female characters in the novels being perceived with an “illness” because they are women who do not want to follow the typical female norms. In The Awakening, once Mrs. Pontellier begins to change her normal, expected behaviour to more personalized actions, her husband begins to assume that something is wrong with her, “It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier 's mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we would assume like a garment with which to appear before the world." (Chopin 75) Since Edna is suddenly not following the ideal behaviour her husband set up for her, it is automatically assumed that Edna is possibly suffering from an illness. Mrs. Pontellier’s freewill choices are being mixed up with insane behaviour because it is not what a typical, normal woman would do. Jane suffers from the same problem on a more dramatic level in The Yellow Wallpaper. As Jane is already assumed she is mentally ill from the start, no one gives her the chance that allows her to see the difference between mental outbursts and free choice of actions, “Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good. But what is one to do?” (Gilman 648) In this quote, Jane does see