A Psychological Analysis of the Story of an Hour
论文作者:佚名论文属性:短文 essay登出时间:2009-04-15编辑:黄丽樱点击率:7398
论文字数:2340论文编号:org200904152212511307语种:英语 English地区:中国价格:免费论文
关键词:The Story of an HourPsychological AnalysisFeminist Consciousnesseffortsdeath
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Abstract】Kate Chopin is a famous feminist writer. A strong sense of feminine consciousness is embodied in her works. Her successful adoption of the psychological approach, specifically the stream of consciousness, adds grandeur to splendor of her literary creation. The successful employment of psychological approach in The Story of an Hour not only has achieved dramatic effects and intensified the themes but also has exposed the women’s anaclitic situation.
Kate Chopin was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1851. She was raised by a strict Catholic mother and attended the Academy of Sacred Heart, where she was expected to learn all the social graces. Later she moved to New Orleans and there she married to Oscar Chopin. But it was after the death of her husband that she started her literary career. She has written many short stories and published two collections, Bayou Folk and A Night in Acadie, in succession and some famous novels such as Awakening, which is now regarded as one of the feminist masterpieces. However, when it was first published, attacks threw upon her and stunned her so much that she kept silent and wrote little else throughout the rest of her life because it has boldly touched upon and exposed some sensitive social problems. In her novels, we will find that she often repeated the same theme and related marriage to the cage of bars.
If we throw our eyes onto her Emancipation: the Life Fable, The Story of an Hour and Awakening, we will be assured of this. She has given us so much food to consider the significance of life and marriage and the embarrassing situation in which women lived that she is later labeled by the radical feminists in 1970s as one of the woman writers with a strong feminine consciousness, although surprisingly, she herself resolutely denied it. Actually it is understandable that she is taken as a progressive woman writer of feminine consciousness because in her times, the second women movement began to sweep over the whole country. And in her works the heroines were not merely contented with their family life. Instead, they tried every ways and means to break the fetters forced upon them. They wanted to pursue their individual freedom and spiritual independence and didn’t want to play a traditional role any longer. Most of the heroines under her pen, like Edna Pontellier and Mrs. Mallard, were more or less rebellious, although their resistance mostly ended in self-destruction and compromise. Maybe she was so radical that the public hadn’t yet prepared to accept her then. Just as Jane Bail Howard put, she uttered a voice ‘so far ahead of her times’.
When Kate Chopin lived, another influential trend that prevailed in the United States and the European Continent, namely the so-called psychoanalysis presented by the Austrian psychologist, Sigmund Freud. He divides human psyche roughly into three parts: conscious, preconscious and unconscious mind. In illuminating the mental processes he further distinguishes the three psyche areas of the mind as the Id, the ego, and the superego. To elucidate their interplay, he put forward the pleasure, reality and the morality principles. His theories have contributed a lot to modern psychology and also exerted a profound influence upon many social aspects, including literature. Many famous writers attribute their debts to him. Although there is no much evidence that Freud has directly influenced Kate Chopin, yet we can find that she has repeatedly adopted the psychologi
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