The American South has a unique, complicated soul, portrayed as a society that clings to a diluted and romanticized history of itself, coping through perseverance. This desperation to achieve an ideal, forgotten period, despite natural progress not slowing down makes the portrayal of social systems both majestic and gruesome simultaneously. This concept of resisting change in favor for this southern fantasy can be applied to almost any sociological area; but this willful ignorance is distinctly seen applied to gender throughout 19th and 20th century literature. For a Southern Woman, one of the highest social sins is to be subversive towards her gender role; an even higher sin if this woman is a mother. Those that dare to violate their positions in life, often end up cold and barren, drawing a parallel to the post-war American South, as shown through the works of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury. The main women in these works …show more content…
Without a platform for agency, the idea of self-actualization can crumble upon itself. One of the most explicit pieces to make a statement on the agency of women in the 19th century south is The Awakening by Kate Chopin. The title itself can be interpreted, to be literally a reference to the unbridling of Edna Pontellier’s learned position in life in favor for a truer sense of self-actualization. Of course, being as it is 19th century Louisiana, this re-education of Edna ends in tragedy. Edna Pontellier, as a white woman in the leisure class, was assigned at birth her role in the Southern economy; that of a vessel for which her husbands kin would spring out of. The image of Adele Ratignolle, the doting mother, the attentive wife, is what Edna is supposed to be according to tradition; nothing more, nothing less. The two women, while friends, simply do not see the concept of individuality in at all the same