The New Woman Movement By Kate Chopin

675 Words2 Pages

The New Woman movement by Chopin fit into the ideals of the ever changing world of Modernism. Women noticed that in order to be recognized they needed to first remove themselves from male dominance. In order to engage this they began to take possession of their own bodies, instead of being sexual objects they changed it to being sexual subjects. Therefore they were in power of being active participants and agents of their own sexual desires, power, and pleasures of the world. Chopin wanted to create this world that woman had the same right and privileges as men. When Kate was writing, during that time women suffered from self-repression, low self-esteem, no individual identity and were living in oppression. At such a time when the opinion of …show more content…

From Chopin’s writings we can see that he is exposing the workings of a world that kills individuality by forcing men and women to subscribe to the ideal. Kate makes a comment on the conflicts engendered by social and sexual roles. Masculine possessiveness has been revealed as the pivotal problem with husband, wife, and marriage (Kate). But not only does Chopin make this revelation, expose this world - additionally she subverts and overturns it. In other words Chopin has made this world more about woman than it was previously known for which was male dominant culture. Also Chopin undermines patriarchy by endowing the other, the woman, with an individual identity and a sense of self, to which the letters she leaves behind give voice. But the real version of herself is actually created by the men that she is around. Therefore the mast plot of her existence is actually false. The only problem with this new and aggressive sexuality was that the New Woman movement did not exactly explicate how a woman was supposed to apply it. The adulterous relations that women read in novels seemed like a fantastic way to overturn convention, but it was not very credible for these new feminists to tell women to cheat on their husbands (Kate). Some women tried to emphasize …show more content…

There are many others and they all have one thing in common. Women have rights and their own life. Chopin does a fantastic job showing that in all of her stories. She shows that women have their own life and they should live it without someone holding them back. This is a modernist view even in today’s society. It was more like a foreshadow of the beginning of the feminist movement. As well as showcasing that people should do what they want like Chekhov and Ibsen initiated into their

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