Jayasree K.,
Literature is a medium that incites changes of the women and women writers in the years to come and as well as in the past.Literature reinforced society’s limitations for girls or empowered girls to live a more self-fulfilling life within society’s standards. The women writers in the past had talked so much about the women independence and equality. One among them is Kate Chopin, whose heroine in The Awakening experienced a shift in her attitude towards the role of a mother and a wife in a stereotypical Victorian marriage by rejecting the prescribed roles and freely expressing her sexuality. By taking a closer look at the public reception of the female authors in the nineteenth-century, as well as the common themes that Chopin and Brontë used to expose the narrow-mindedness of the patriarchal society and the lack of basic human rights to freedom in this period, the novels raise awareness to the oppression of women and help in the establishment of a path towards the long-awaited female independence and gender equality.In both North America and Europe in the 19th century, women and men were expected to fill separate spheres of society.Beginning in the 19th century, women's acceptance of these traditional roles began to dissipate.The ideology of Separate Spheres rested on a definition of the ‘natural’ characteristics of women and men.This paper aims to look back the women in the nineteenth century; perhaps we call it as Victorian era.
The Awakening, Gender Equality, Independence