Wolff’s View on Feminine Sexuality in Chopin’s The Awakening :: Chopin Awakening

Wolffs View on Feminine Sexuality in Chopins The alterIn her essay Un-Utterable Longing The Discourse of Feminine Sexuality in Kate Chopins The Awakening Cynthia Griffin Wolff sees the lack of a languagefor Edna Pontelliers sexual desires in break upicular and female sexuality in ecumenicas the main theme in Chopins novel. She particularly looks at how issues of sexuality remain unsaid in the novel, or how they are denotative in a different way, because of the lack of a language of fair(prenominal) sexuality. As Ross C Murfin points out in his introduction to this essay, Wolff combines several theory-based perspectives such as feminism, gender studies, new historicism, psychoanalytic criticism, and deconstruction (376). Wolff introduces her thesis in her initial discussion of the opening personation of The Awakening stressing the point that the parrot has no language of its give. She remarks that there is a sense of riddle (or fraud) rough this bird who seems able to com municate but is not (376). likewise the main character Edna Pontellier cant communicate her needs. The first part of Wolffs essay is a six-page assessment of the image of women current at the end of the nineteenth century showing the lack of a language for intimacy and sexuality. She looks specifically at the work of William Acton, an author widely acquire at the time. According to him women didnt have sexual feelings of any agreeable hence he saw no reason to talk about those issues. Wolff criticizes that this false image of women as a-sexual beings created by writers such as Acton also mislead the men of that time in their perception of women. Wolff argues that a patois of motherhood (386) replaced the missing language of intimacy and sexuality. In this context she refers to the passage when Lonce comes home, Edna rejects his advances, and instead of reproaching her of neglecting her marital duties, he blames her for not fetching care of the children. Lonce turns the disappo intment of the rejection into a reproach of leave out motherly duties. According to Wolff, the true subject of Chopins novel, may be less the particular dilemma of Mrs. Pontellier than the larger problems of female narrative that it reflects and if Ednas poignant fate is in part a reflection of her own habits, it is also, in equal part, a measure of societys chastisement to allow its women a language of their own (388).