Struggling for a New Identity: Glimpses of Nineteenth Century Womanhood in the Fiction of Gilman and Chopin

Abstract

The nineteenth century marked the first important milestone in the history of women not only because of increased awareness about their situation, which would lead to the feminist movement, but also because such gender awareness and feminist attitudes became part of the literary canon, forever changing the way the works of women writers would be written and interpreted. Believing that women’s history may offer a vantage point from which to assess and understand how a society works, this article makes women’s issues its main focus. The setting is the controversial nineteenth century, which is examined through a combined approach of close reading and an analysis of secondary sources. This article is a comparative study of two stories produced by two nineteenth century American women writers tackling the situation of the women of the time, the difficult transition from male expectations to female self-assertion, and the importance of such texts as representations of the period when they were written.