The Female Expression and Identity of the Artist and the Artwork in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth

Abstract

The hardships endured by the female protagonists in Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton’s literary works become a general portrayal of twentieth-century women’s confinement to gender roles and their struggle to reconcile them with their own identity. Chopin and Wharton create, as a psychological exercise, the journey of a woman in a search for a sense of identity in defiance of the norms imposed by society. This paper aims to analysethrough the characters of Edna and Lily this journey and the issues that arise concerning the expression of the self and the conflict that emerges when everything is against all odds. Thus, it is necessary to examine the evolution and outcome of two different characters through their contrasts as well as their similarities, and how they channel their expression through art, being one an artist and the other a work of art. Female identity, in both literary works, is shaped under the lens of a socio-cultural ideology that establishes the paradigms of femininity in binary opposition and provides a definition for the notion of womanhood.