Mrs Dalloway and The Awakening : tracing a relation between the growing feminist movements and modern fictions from Late 19th to 20th Century American and English literary landscape

Abstract

Mrs Dalloway and The Awakening are two very widely read English novels known for their feminist stance. In both of the novels, the central characters Clarissa Dalloway and Edna Pontellier undergo an essential moment of self analysis which triggers self- discovery. Their individual journeys are presented as the parallel to the changing social atmospheres. Written in the late Ninetieth and mid Twentieth century, these novels subvert reader‘s expectations with their unconventional characters and the unconventional choices they make. Therefore, in the first portion of this paper I will look at the changing social scenario as an important milieu, taking place on the advent of Modernism. The later portions will discuss about the existing social position of women in society in the light of The Awakening and Mrs Dalloway as well as how the feminist fictions responded to the social reality on the emerge of the feminist movements of that era. Virginia Woolf and Kate Chopin‘s narratives and characterizations emerge as the metaphor for the ‗new woman‘ who comes out breaking all the social standards of the time and search for a free soul. I will also concentrate on how the existing feminist movements influenced these two writers in their personal lives and helped them to come up with such radical works