This web site presents an admirable summary of several issues discussed in “The Awakening.”  Explore women’s rights and discover where Creoles originated.  Check out how  Cheniere Caminada was destroyed and so much more.

Edna’s home would have been similar to this house located on Esplanade Street in New Orleans.  Take a look to obtain a better image of a home within the heart of the French Quarter: http://www.quarteresplanade.com 

Here is an abstract of an intertextual look at “The Awakening” and “The Yellow Wallpaper.”  This is a senior honors thesis that compares psychological disorders of the late nineteenth century and female issues of today. 

A Century of Insanity: The Politics of Women's Hunger, Food and Eating Disorders in Late Nineteenth Century Literature

Jennifer L. Karol
General Honors
B.A. Honors Thesis Abstract

This honors thesis examines the pathologization of women at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for "female diseases" such as hysteria and eating disorders. Using medical, sociological, and literary narratives, I draw parallels between the epidemic invalidism and institutionalization of women for psychological nervous disorders in the late-nineteenth-century U.S. society and contemporary eating disorders in the last two decades. Using contemporary eating disorder theories offered by Kim Chernin, I explored issues of women's mental health as it relates to food, eating, and hunger in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892) and Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899). Applying Chernin's theories to "The Yellow Wallpaper" and The Awakening provides new contexts for thinking about many issues in late-nineteenth-century texts: repressed forms of sexual, intellectual, and artistic expression; women's confinement within the marital, medical, and maternal institutions; and idealized social standards for female beauty. Today, eating disorders like anorexia nervosa and bulimia are considered to be "modern" diseases, however, a close examination of these nineteenth-century texts demonstrates how women's relationship to food, eating, and hunger has always been complicated by problematic female identity and self-development.

source:  http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~honors/theses/s00/Karol.html

--page created by Erin Boeck, lightly edited by LG.