Women Authors as a Mirror of Society - Essay Example

The period of 1865 - 1912 marked one of the most important events in the history of America - the end of the Civil War. The war had claimed many lives and marked the end of slavery. It also marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution which would make America, a young nation then, the world's richest country in the future. During the change of the century, from 1865-1912, American women struggled to obtain freedoms and independence that is taken for granted today. The roles of women during this era were mostly defined by men, often in one of the many books of etiquette that taught them a proper "code of manners" and stated flatly, "The power of a woman is in her refinement, gentleness and elegance; it is she who makes etiquette, and it is she who preserves the order and decency of society".

This was particularly true of middle-class women, and men strived to keep them restrained within the influences of the home. The expectation was for the woman to be "fixed firmly within their sphere of home and hearth", tending to the needs of the family, caring for children, and taking care of the home. Women were expected to remain virtuous and pure, to be modest, devout in their faith, and submissive to their male counterparts (The Yellow Wallpaper, 2008). During this period, the literary representations of writers underwent a massive change. . Romanticism, as a literary movement started in England and also flourished in America.

Much of it was also in the Gothic vein, such as the work of Edgar Allen Poe, Washington Irving, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson stressed the beauty of nature and man's identity as a natural being, themes echoed in the later work of poet Walt Whitman. At the end of war, there was a shift to Realism and later on to Naturalism. American Realists concentrated their writing on select groups or subjects. Important among them was Kate Chopin and her views on marriage and women's roles in the society.

Married at the age of nineteen to Oscar Chopin and widowed at the age of thirty-one with six children and a failing cotton plantation business, Kate's life was difficult and dissatisfactory. The lack of a husband's influence led her to have an affair with a married farmer, an act that was considered outrageous at that time. Her emotions and needs are portrayed through Edna Pontellier in The Awakening. With her husband busy with his brokerage firm in Carondelet Street and not having anything to do, she falls for Robert Lebrun, an immature young man, who "since the age of fifteen, which was eleven years before, each summer at Grand Isle had constituted himself the devoted attendant of some fair dame or damsel.

Sometimes it was a young girl, again a widow; but as often as not it was some interesting married woman." (Chapter 5). On the other hand is Adele Ratignolle, Edna's friend. She sympathizes with Edna, warns Robert not to play with her emotions, and has imaginative cramps and fainting spells and who altogether manifests the way women were expected to behave during those times. Kate Chopin's masterpiece