Who Is Hayden White's The Awakening Of Historical Narrative

The Awakening of Historical Narrative

In The New Historicism and The Awakening (2000), New Historicism is first discovered through “a number of influential critics working between 1920 and 1950” (The New Historicism 257). However, in that time frame, it was referred to as “the historical approach” (The New Historicism 257). This approach was based on the connections between history and narratives. What made this approach distinct from other literary criticisms is that critics began to “interpret” connections between the history of a text parallel to the narrative of a given time (or the time a text was based on). As this “new” way or criticism developed, “new” ways of thinking of texts did too. “New” progressive ideologies and discourses like

“feminist, cultural, and Marxist” were now being studied in literature (The New Historicism 259). New ways of thinking of “the truth” began to evolve and answers to questions deemed at science or truth were no longer functioning to all.
Eventually, New Historicists concluded that “it is treacherously difficult to reconstruct the past as it really was, rather than as we have been conditioned by our own place and time to believe that it was” (The New Historicism 260). History can be subjective. The fault, as philosopher Michel Foucault explains it, is that “the vast web of social, economic, and political” backgrounds deliver different perspectives for history (The New Historicism 261). What enters the realm of narrative for that reason could be biases, assumptions, and prejudices. Thus, it is important to carefully define history as non-linear and non-causational because history is a circular mode of power and the truth depends on who is speaking. For example, The New Historicism and The Awakening cite Stephen Greenblatt’s Learning to Curse (1990) to explain how power affects the texts produced. In Greenblatt’s career, higher powers omitted aspects of literary texts that he had not realized like “who controlled access to the printing press . . . whose voices were being repressed as well as represented in literary texts, [and] what social strategies were being served by the aesthetic values [authoritative figures] constructed” (The New Historicism 263). This is all to say, narratives have boundaries and the power of New Historicism allowed critics to oppose these boundaries and view narratives in different perspectives from those given.
Similarly, New Historicist and literary criticist Hayden White explores the debate of narrative in his theology The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory (1984).

In his article, White discusses the nineteenth century’s post-structuralism view of contextualizing narrative itself into history. He addresses the different discourses provided by different historians, portraying New Historicist styles in his article himself, to emphasize the importance of historical communication. White’s stand is that history described through “chronological scales” do not provide justice to the experiences by societies (White 11). He followed anthropological discourses provided by Claude Levi-Strauss that led him to construe that “there is no such thing as a single scale for the ordering of events, but rather as many chronologies as there are culture-specific ways of representing the passage of time” (White 11). Culture shapes events and events shape culture and because of this, there is no escaping the connections between narrative and history. Narrative, in addition to providing new understandings also provide significance. “A chronicle is not a narrative, even if it contains the same set of facts as its informational content” because “narrative utilizes other codes [to produce] a meaning quite different from that of any chronicle” (White 19). White emphasizes the importance of multi-directional historical discourses because they can provide what science can struggle to do.

Time is essential to understanding history, but thick descriptions enhance the context of history to produce functional truths.
One key concept to further understand “truth” for New Historicism criticisms, through Hayden White’s article, is fictional narratives. White himself considers that “narrative accounts of subject matter as an end itself seems methodologically unsound” (White 1). He introduced “imaginary” discourses that included: “epic, the folk tale, myth, romance, comedy, farce, and the like” (White 2). New Historicism, however, as White depicts, understand that fictional meanings can produce truth. Though fictional stories address ideologies through “false” plots and characters it is possible to “produce an imaginary discourse about real events that may not be less ‘true’ for being ‘imaginary’” (White 33). This is because New Historicists like White take into account that interpretations hold soundness. If the imaginations of literature are upheld through historical “truth” and “facts” then it may be proved true through events and discourse surrounding the period of the “imaginary” narrative. For example, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) comes into question of validity in the literary world. Though she is writing of the past in the, then, future 10 years after the basis, she received awful reviews because of the “unsupported” ideologies in 1988. The “fiction” she produced held reality, possibility, and validity. This reaction can show how New Historical interpretations in literature were deemed as “present threats” in the 19th-century.
New Historicist Margit Stange in A New Historicist Perspective (2000) analyzes the historical discourses during the period of The Awakening (1899) to further examine the truth of multiple discourses and conditions of the 19th-century. The Awakening followed the evolution of Edna Pontellier as she, like New Historicists, began to question her role in the society as a woman. As criticist Ross C. Murfin points out in A Selected Bibliography (2000), we see how she faced the issues of “women, property, self-possession, and value” (Murfin 269). Stange solidifies Kate Chopin’s narrative through historicizing feminist, social and power discourses, all of which are essential to understanding New Historicism. Stange introduced feminist culture in many ways; Stange included discourses from 5 different historical feminist theorists, ranging from the 1940s onwards to the 1980s. This is important for The Awakening because it was essential to understand how self-ownership was defined for feminists at the time, that is the “right to refuse” (Stange, 276). Stange further enhances this historical discourse by including marginalized dialogues into her article. For example, there was a disagreement within the sisterhood of liberalism on birth control because of the “discourses by suffragists, moral reformers, and free love advocates” (Stange 276). Through this, we are able to see that in the 19th-century, liberalism was not fully identified concretely additionally complicating Edna’s journey as she proclaims her self-ownership.
Stange also considers other historical discourses the 19th-century faced like social laws and economical standings.

This is taken account because self-ownership included materialistic ownership as well. In 1882, the Married Women’s Property Act “gave married women varying rights of ownership” (Stange 280). Edna’s character was raised in Kentucky and Kentucky somewhere “with the most advanced separation of property in marriage” (Stange 281). This is a style of historical narrative like previous New Historicists employed, that recognizes that the place Edna “imaginatively” came from was also “historically” enforced. Edna’s character faced powerful, authoritative discourses that tried to shift her envisions from “right” to “wrong,” but Edna still pursued liberalism. She began to define her own discourse, one that 19th-century conditions fought to refrain her from. The Awakening (1899) was a fictional literary work that embodies factual progression today; New Historicist Margit Stange provided the many interpretations needed to bridge contemporary understandings to the historical discourses of The

Awakening.
Though Kate Chopin’s work was written 10 years later than the date it was set in, New Historicisms provided lenses to understand the “truths” behind Kate Chopin’s work. New Historicism allowed for different discourses like Chopin’s to arise many years later. Excluding contemporary mindsets, readers are given the opportunity to trace different discourses in different eras other than what they are born into. Narratives allowed for meaningful and impactful knowledge that can continue to help evolve the future. Ross C. Murfin, Hayden White, and Margit Stange are only a few New Historicists that opened new horizons to explore and interpret. The doors for new explanations and understandings are now open to all through the incorporation or narrative and history all in one.