Rebecca Dickson (Essay Date Spring-Summer 1999)

SOURCE: Dickson, Rebecca. "Kate Chopin, Mrs. Pontellier, and Narrative Control." The Southern Quarterly 37, nos. 3-4 (spring-summer 1999): 38-43.

In the following essay, Dickson outlines Chopin's place in the context of her female predecessors such as Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, and contends that in The Awakening "Chopin envisioned and portrayed a woman more firmly in control of her own story and her own body than any of her predecessors had imagined."

Until the twentieth century, the vast majority of plots created by, for, and about women were focused on an ingenue and were controlled by men, either quietly or overtly. Even when a young woman is the center of the story, and even if male characters seldom appear in a given novel, a man with his financial power inevitably holds the key to a heroine's happiness while patriarchal economic, political, and moral...