The Awakening

Carolyn L. Mathews (Essay Date 3 September 2002)

SOURCE: Mathews, Carolyn L. "Fashioning the Hybrid Women in Kate Chopin's The Awakening." Mosaic 35, no. 3 (3 September 2002): 127-49.

In the following excerpt, Mathews examines the meaning of the clothing imagery in The Awakening and contends that Chopin "uses dress as a means of representing female subjectivity."

During the years surrounding the turn into the twentieth century, discourse on dress proliferated, resulting in what fashion historian Joan Severa calls "a universal understanding of style" (454). Americans of the period purchased more clothing per capita than ever before, and manuals like Dorothy Quigley's What Dress Makes of Us or Mary Haweis's The Art of Dress appeared alongside books on dress reform like J. H. Kellogg's The Evils of Fashionable Dress. Early feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman addressed the topic … as did highly respected American psychologists such as William James...