The Devil in the House: The Awakening of Chopin’s Anti-Hero

Azad, Bahareh

doi:10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.17.22

ILSHS > ILSHS Volume 17 > The Devil in the House: The Awakening of Chopin’s...

< Back to Volume

The Devil in the House: The Awakening of Chopin’s Anti-Hero

Full Text PDF

Abstract:

The mythic quality of Kate Chopin‟s The Awakening (1899) derives from recurrent images of archetypal symbols such as sea, sun, and journey, accompanied by up/down motif representing death and rebirth. Having been decanonized for infringing the traditional codes of marriage and motherhood, Chopin‟s work, this study proves, violates yet another convention, that of the mythological theorists, namely Joseph Campbell‟s. Being a female principle as opposed to Campbell‟s macho hero, Chopin‟s protagonist, Edna undergoes the same archetypal pattern of quest, initiation, and descent into the underworld. In her archetypal passage from innocence to experience, however, and through rebellious acts of self-expression, viz. painting, music, gambling, and extra-marital relationships, the heroine not only ceases serving the interest of the society which has reduced her to the position of an object to be possessed by husband or devoured by children but also challenges its core values, overturning the fairy tale of “the angel in the house.” And while having inherited the narcissistic characteristic of the conventional hero, Edna turns more into the heroine of the self than of the community, who in ultimate defiance of the romantic ideal of ever-victorious heroes chooses not to ascend from the underworld but to abort the last phase of the heroic mission and, thus, differentiates Chopin‟s modernist representation of the realistic heroine from the idealistic portrayals of the male hero in the mythological canon.

Info:

Periodical:

International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences (Volume 17)

Pages:

22-26

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18052/www.scipress.com/ILSHS.17.22

Citation:

B. Azad, "The Devil in the House: The Awakening of Chopin’s Anti-Hero", International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, Vol. 17, pp. 22-26, 2014

Online since:

November 2013

Authors:

Bahareh Azad

Keywords:

Archetypal Criticism, Awakening, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Kate Chopin, Myth of the Hero

Export:

RIS, BibTeX, Text

Distribution:

Open Access

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

References:

Adamski S. Adam., NeuroQuantology 9(3) (2011) 563-571.

Beer Janet, Elizabeth Nolan. Kate Chopin's The Awakening : A Sourcebook. London: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Bloom Harold. Introduction. Kate Chopin. Ed. Bloom. New York: Bloom's Literary Criticism, 2007. 1-6. Print.

Campbell Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Print.

Chopin Kate. The Awakening and Selected Short Stories. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University, 2009. The Kate Chopin Archive. Web. 12 Mar. (2013).

Franklin Rosemary F., American Literature 56(4) (1984) 510-526.

Gilbert, Sandra M. Edna as an Aphrodite Figure. " Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Bloom, s Literary Criticism, 2008. 51-59. Print.

Heilmann Ann. The Awakening and New Woman Fiction., The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Ed. Janet Beer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. 87-104. Print.

Jung Carl. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Ed. Michael Fordham. Vol. 9. London: Routledge, 1954. Print.

Knights Pamela. Kate Chopin and the Subject of Childhood., The Cambridge Companion to Kate Chopin. Ed. Janet Beer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. 44-58.

Ringe Donald A., American Literature 43(9) (1972) 580-588.

Smith Evans Lansing. The Hero Journey in Literature: Parables of Poesis. Lanham: University Press of America, 1997. Print.

Stevens, Anthony. Archetype: A Natural History of the Self. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1928. Print.

Zhang Kai. Archetype and Allegory in Journey to the West., Diss. University of Victoria, 2003. OhioLink. Web. 2 July 2013. ( Received 06 November 2013; accepted 11 November 2013 ).

Show More Hide

Cited By:

This article has no citations.