Stacy Touponce
11/4/2013
English-102
Instructor: Dr. Stan Kajs
Literary Feminism
“There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men
and women believe they have right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature”. This
powerful quote emphasizes the feminist theory by referring to a time where women were forced
to face gender inequalities and live in a world of patriarchal culture. Women since the beginning
of time have been treated as second-class citizens. It was during this time in the 18th century that
the first wave of feminism was created, and this quote was established.
The first wave in Feminism took place during the 18th century and early 20th century,
influencing writers with feminist outlooks to focus on equal contract, marriage, parenting,
and property rights for women through literary feminism. Two authors that took a feminist
outlook in their writings were Kate Chopin, in “A Story of an Hour”, and William Faulkner, in
“A Rose for Emily”.
Using the literary feminism theory, Chopin and Faulkner exposed experiences of women
to inform feminism forms such as gender inequality and patriarchal culture in their short stories.
As with their literature, feminism literature was one of many feminist disciplines used to inform
and understand gender inequalities and women’s suffrage taken place over generations of time.
Feminist literature theory is about the historic and present living of women’s society.
Feminist Literature is literary criticism informed by feminist theories that emerged from
Feminist movements over a large range of generations. This feminist discipline, one of many, is
used to capture major movements of feminism starting from a time before the 19th century until
today through literature. At a time women couldn’t even vote was during the 19th century in
which women had little rights to begin with and were subjected to the rule of the male species.
In Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” and Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” the main
characters are both female. Both women in these stories were bound by what society expected of
them. Each woman in different ways tries unsuccessfully to gain their freedom. Mrs. Mallard and
Emily both lived in patriarchy cultures, a system of male domination in society.
With Emily, Emily felt imprisoned by society and her father. Most of her life she endured
her father’s never-ending denial that there is any man suitable for her. All she ever wanted was
companionship from another person such as marriage. She spent her life taking care of her
father, which society saw as her being snobby, not being able to pick a suitable spouse for herself
and settle down. The society, being the town people, thought she thought of herself to be too
good for anyone else. When Emily lost the only male figure in her life she sought companionship
desperately, which resulted in her encounter with Homer and started dating him. Eventually she
realized the man he was, the type of man to leave her. After already losing the only male figure
in her early life, desperation had led her to not ever wanting to lose Homer. This attachment to
having a male figure by her side drove her to insanity, which eventually resulted in her murder of
Homer. Closed off from the world, Emily stayed in her home for the next 50 years, only visited
by the black servant who did everything for her and retrieved anything she needed. It is there
where she had keep Homer’s late corpse on her bed so that he would never leave her again. This
obsessive impulse is the result of the image her society and even her father had laid upon her as a
normal life for a woman; that a woman is nothing without a man by her side.
Louise’s situation mirrors Emily’s life, but as Emily was imprisoned by her father,
Louise was imprisoned by her husband. She lived in a society where divorce was not accepted.
Marriage was for life and you stood by your husband until death. Louise felt trapped in her
husband’s life and their marriage. She felt as if her marriage was binding and she couldn’t fully
live the life she wanted. The story showed the bindings and restraints of the husband had on
Louise and when she received the news of his death, it felt as though she had broken the shackles
of her marriage and obtained her freedom as a woman. However when revealed that her husband
was alive and not dead, it showed how fast she filled with grief and sudden death not that her
freedom had not yet been established. Her sister and her husband’s friend thought the news of his
death could kill her due to her heart problems but instead it filled her with happiness and relief of
being free from the marriage.
With both stories, the male dominated society in which women lived in forced them to
undergo emotions, decisions, and situations that society would of declared to not be proper and
right for a woman. In a Rose for Emily, Society had assumed that Emily was snobby because of
her inability to find a husband, but when her father died, they would assume that she would
gather the strength and seek out a husband of her own. Instead, she decided to fight society’s
assumption of what a proper woman would do and killed Homer and hid his body away for fifty
years. In this, Emily obtained her own freedom by casting out the world, and thus becoming
immersed in her own house until her death.
With Story of an Hour, Louise was thought to be devastated when the news of her
husband’s death would reach her. With her society, they view the end of the husband’s life as
also the end of the wife’s life, as she is deemed useless without her husband. This sexist view
on women’s role in society was the focal point to how both Chopin and Faulkner wanted their
characters to overcome this outlook on women by finding their own path to obtaining self-worth
and their freedom away from society’s standpoint.
After assessing both literature pieces, traditional gender roles seem to play a major role in
the plot of the stories. Both Emily and Louise are viewed as home bodies, with no other use than
being bound to the house and subjected to petty and menial tasks of a housewife. Louise sought
to overcome this. Although her body was inevitably failing her, she still desired a life outside her
marriage. Emily’s ideologies seem a bit different. She desired the unconventional method to
achieving a husband and being happy, even if it killed that individual and created a necrophiliac
relationship with the corpse to emphasize her own idea of being together and overcoming her
own loneliness. As result, both women attempt to overcome sexism and gender stereotypes in the
authors’ hope that they break away from social inequalities and norms.
Both Chopin and Faulkner sought out to adhere to the four tenets of feminism:
“Anatomical differences, men and women are the same,” “men in leadership,” human fulfillment
will occur when people deny that one’s sex effects one nature and acknowledge their own
talents,” and “harmful effects on traditional roles and social equalities.” These ideologies are
what Emily and Louise sought to overcome in their society. With Emily’s father and Louise’s
husband view as men in leadership, both women were determined to find their own path and
shatter their male counterparts’ view on their lives. With the tenet, “human fulfillment
will occur when people deny that one’s sex effects one nature and acknowledge their own
talents,” Emily tried to achieve a husband without her father’s guidance and society’s view of
her. In this manner, Emily set out to acknowledge her own abilities and talents, even though her
methods seemed unorthodox.
When analyzing Emily and Louise as character, both seemed to struggle with their
identity as women, as they were both ruled under the thumbnail of a male figure. Both women
appeared to have failed to achieve their place as strong individuals. With Emily, although she
was able to find Homer, she inevitably succumbs to her own madness and becomes less of a
woman and more of a child toward the end of the story. She is, in the end, bound to a man once
again, much like her father before Homer’s appearance. Louise almost succeeded in achieving as
a more powerful individual had it not been for her husband coming through the door and the
shock killing her. She did, however, come close to achieving an epiphany about herself and that
she could find a better life without her husband. It would seem that out of the two characters that
were trying to progress as individuals, Emily seemed like the one who couldn’t progress, as it
looked as though she regressed with her relationship with Homer.
Inevitably, both characters were immersed and bound to traditional roles and social
inequalities. Both Emily and Louise were viewed as second class citizens in their societies, and
this environment led to become harmful to their health; Emily’s mental health, and Louise’s
physical health. In this way, they were destined to fail to achieve anything better than that with
which they were given. However, they did attempt to overcome social inequalities and traditional
roles by breaking away from the traditions from which the society laid upon them.
With the feminist theory, Chopin and Faulkner attempted to address a common problem
in the 1700s through the 1900s. Their effort is seen with strong vigor as they were able to create
a modern day 18th century society built upon the premise that males’ rule is absolute, and create
two characters that would try to break the cycle of sexism and feminist suppression. As a
feminist writer, Chopin sought out to prove that even near death; a woman could overcome the
ceiling of doubt that has been over women’s head for centuries. Her character Louise exudes true
strength and hope for better when she hears that her husband is dead, and it is this new found
strength that Chopin was trying to prove, that true strength in women can come from the darkest
moments.
With Faulkner, he sought to prove women are strong enough that break away from the
social norm, and find their own happiness, even if it preys upon the twisted. Emily seemed to
have achieved a little strength despite her decent into madness, as she found what she wanted
without the aid of her father or her society. One could assume that Faulkner and Chopin sought a
similar ideal, that women could find their own strength even a male dominated society.
Throughout both stories, Chopin and Faulkner were able to clearly establish an
understanding of the inequalities of society and gender roles in that time period. They showed
That even in literature, women continue to strive higher for equality and continue to break down
Stereotypes and sexism little by little.
Bibliography
Brizee, A., & Thompkins, J. C. (Eds.). (n.d.). Feminist Criticism. Retrieved
April 21, 2010, from Purdue Owl Online Writing Lab website:
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/722/11/ This resource
helped you begin the process of understanding literary theory and
schools of criticism and how they are used in the academy.
Feminist Literary Critcism. (n.d.). Retrieved November 21, 2013, from
Princeton-Feminist literary criticism website:
http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Feminist_literary_
criticism.html I used this site primarily to get background knowledge
on feminist criticism.
Shaw, P. (1988). Feminist Literary Criticism. In P. Shaw (Author), A Report
from the Academy: Feminist Literary Criticism (4th ed., Vol.57, p.
499). Online Literary Reference Centre. I used this for information on
tenets of feminism and background information on gender
inequality and patriarchy culture.