SOURCE: Mahlendorf, Ursula R. “Kate Chopin's The Awakening¹: Engulfment and Diffusion.” In The Wellsprings of Literary Creation: An Analysis of Male and Female “Artist Stories” from the German Romantics to American Writers of the Present, pp. 147-59. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1985.

In the following essay, Mahlendorf considers how Kate Chopin's The Awakening was perhaps the first feminist künstlerroman and how the mother-figure is the possible antithesis of the artist-hero.

Up to this point of our inquiry, we have examined the patterns of creativity which authors from the Romantics to Franz Kafka ascribe to the heroes of their narratives about artists. Upon these heroes they project fears and wishes which concern their own creativity. The problem often involves their own survival as creative persons and the work turned into a self exploration. Often they attribute to their heroes their own aesthetic practices and theories. The recurrent pattern...