Kate Chopin's 1899 novella is certainly not a text that has suffered from a shortage of interpretations. The critics who seized at the opportunity of explicating it drawing from the myriad scholarly perspectives offered chiefly by the currently burgeoning fields of feminist theory, gender studies, and queer theory, have certainly produced a wealth of both bold and insightful, even if sometimes puzzling and radical, critical analyses, all of which unanimously emphasize the fact that The Awakening is a text which in significant ways problematizes the notion of subjectivity and enquires about a possibility of narrativizing identity, in particular gender identity, differently; not as something essential, natural, and stable, but rather as something constructed over time, processual, always implicated in language, and, last but not least, transgressive and performative. In a way, the following analysis attempts an approach polemical to the dualistic readings of the text, such as that of Joyce Dyer's, who summarized Edna Pontellier, the novella's heroine, as "one whose mission is to begin the painful process of bridging two centuries, two worlds, two visions of gender. So appropriate as a turn-of-the-century piece, The Awakening is about the beginning of selfhood, not its completion" (116). Instead, I would suggest that the most insightful interpretations of Chopin's work are the ones that try to destabilize the dualistic reading that Dyer proposes, and concentrate on the ways in which it foregrounds uncertainty and instability, going beyond the notion of selfhood, rather than trying to hail its beginning, especially if it is presupposed on the binary vision of gender, for such a vision seems to undermine the significance and complexity of Edna's struggle. (fragment of text)
JavaScript jest wyłączony w Twojej przeglądarce internetowej. Włącz go, a następnie odśwież stronę, aby móc w pełni z niej korzystać.