Virtue and Self-assertion in Kate Chopin’s At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899)

Abstract

Throughout history, women were victimized and oppressed by men in patriarchal cultures. Women due to the patriarchal culture faced rejection and punishment from the community. Patriarchy was the most powerful institution which allowed men to control women. It is a culture which has its manifestation in legal, political, and economic activities. This unjust system gives the patriarch the full right to be superior to women and to anyone considered weak. It is an ideology which maintains male superiority and dominance. The patriarchal system used virtue of women to serve their gendered purposes. Women were deprived of practicing equal human rights or equal moral worth with men.

Virtue and self-assertion were incompatible in the Victorian society. A self-asserted woman contrasted a virtuous true mother-woman. A woman was fully accepted for being a mother. Her identity was attached to motherhood. Women's concepts of their selfhoods had systematically been subordinated and belittled. A virtuous woman had no sense of the self. Any self-confident woman was regarded as being out of the predominant gender norms. Thus, the sense of the female self was so difficult to develop in a Western gendered system. The female self was imposed on women by society, and it was constrained by the cultural definitions of gender.

The proposed thesis discusses different assumptions about the concepts of virtue and self-assertion and debate them in Kate Chopin’s At Fault (1890) and The Awakening (1899). The study highlights how the two concepts are a major concern in Chopin’s narratives. It sheds light on the obstacles that hindered a Victorian woman from attaining an asserted self. The study falls into a preface, three chapters, a conclusion, and a works cited list.