感想

3.Freedom or confinement:doors and windows

Throughout the novel, she uses a lot of imagery of doors and windows. It represents a state of being imprisoned and bound to freedom. It can also be derived from Foucault's concept of prison and confinement, marriage as a prison that restricted her thoughts and her body. The door becomes a partition between private and public spaces. Hu Qihao mentions that outside the "door", Mrs. Mallard represents the Freudian "superego", a moralized ego, in the public sphere, while inside the "door", In the private sphere, Mrs. Mallard reproduces the Freudian "ego", a kind of instinct and desire made up of irrational impulses. [4]The American feminist writer Betty Friedan once said, "When women sacrifice their personalities and careers to fulfill their duties as wives and mothers, they are left with a painful sense of the lack of meaning in their lives and a profound emptiness within. Friedan, an American feminist writer, once said, "After women have sacrificed their personalities and careers to fulfill their duties as good wives and mothers, they are left with a painful sense of the lack of meaning in their lives and a profound emptiness in their hearts; women are faced with a schizophrenic personality split. Here the door and the window become symbols of the "imprisonment of marriage". In Discipline and Punish, Foucault refers to three means of discipline, namely hierarchical surveillance, normative adjudication and censorship. She is subjected to this middle-class family model and is forced to be the angel of the family. But the news of her husband's "death" quickly awakens her from this hallucinatory dream. According to Foucault, "Where there is power, there is resistance." [5]The awakening of her self in the midst of the scrutiny and imprisonment of her marriage is a silent but determined rebellion.

4.The complexity of this text

First of all,The first contradiction is whether her pursuit of freedom is really "liberal feminist"? Or maybe it's just a morbid display of "love."Seyersted’s early biography of Chopin describes the story neutrally as “an extreme example of the theme of self-assertion.”And Emliy Toth had an interpretation of this novel: “most radical attack on marriage,on one’s dominance over another.”Toth further elaborated this statement into: “Although Louise's death is an occasion for deep irony directed at patriarchal blindness about women's thoughts, Louise dies in the world of her family where she has always sacrificed for others.”[3]

But many scholars also disagree with Toth’s opinion,They argue that there is no "evidence" in the novel that reminds the reader that Mrs. Mallard is oppressed by the patriarchy. There is no textual evidence for the previous speculation. And the reason why the use of feminist literary theory can fall into the trap of subjectivism is that the story is not about the oppression of women by marriage, but about Mrs. Mallard personally.At the beginning of the novel,Mrs.Mallard wishes to "live for herself",[6] which is often described as the embodiment of Mrs. Mallard's pursuit of self-awareness, which indicates she had sacrificed herself for her husband ,but there is no solid evidence behind this interpretation.

Many attribute the death of Chopin's own husband as the trigger for Chopin to write this novel，but Berkove argues that we should not make too many connections between this novel and Chopin's personal life, but rather understand it more in terms of the text itself.[7]At the beginning of this story, "Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble." The phraseology is vague; however, the rest of the story gradually makes clear the nature of the heart trouble. Alone in her room, when she "abandoned" herself, a whispered word "escaped" her lips: "Free!" [6]The conjunction first of abandonment and then of something escaping her is significant. What was then in her heart is made clear by the two lines of the next paragraph: "She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her.

At the same time,Berkove believes that the Mrs. Mallard hold a strange view of love,and the wording of the second sentence includes her as well as her husband?as a "crime," a powerful will that "bends" the other person. This is a distorted view of love, which typically delights in pleasing and giving to the other. Believing love a "crime" cannot be considered a normal attitude, much less an emotionally healthy one. The description of Mrs. Mallard's morbid emotions in the text may not point to the so-called "pain of awakening", but may be truly pathological.[7]

Additionally, "facing the open window", and behind that window are birds, and clouds,and the windows represent “freedom”.Then Chopin mentioned: "And yet she had loved him—sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter? What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!"This love seems too fragile for her,but it did exist. But this love was always subordinated to her quest for "absolute freedom".

Through language, the author expresses the stark contrast between the physical weakness of Mrs. Mallard and the intensity of her mental activity,especially in the plot of Mrs. Mallard’s death. This representation of the separation of flesh and spirit even shows the complexity of Mrs. Mallard's heart and the repeated struggle of the author's values between submission and resistance.

At the end of the novel, Mrs. Mallard dies because of "joy", When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease—of the joy that kills. It is considered ironic that on the one hand Chopin does not consider marriage to be a "continuous state of uninterrupted happiness", but she is also interested in the "extreme freedom" that Mrs. Mallard seeks.Although she did not think this freedom is possible. which is almost an irony in the author's quest for freedom, as the woman who is a prisoner of the patriarchy wants to escape from this prison, then she must be punished, and her punishment is to die of "joy". Rather than expressing Chopin's irony in the story, one can also see her denial of the possibility of escaping from a patriarchal marriage. But the yearning for freedom and the vague criticism of marriage, these shades of feminist thought displayed by all the female protagonists at the front door, are these fake? Of course not. It's just the difference between Chopin's repeated examination and mulling over of her ideas, which is a reflection of the complexity of her writing, which repeatedly moves and jumps between traditional women and liberal feminists. The ending can be read as having two meanings, one as an irony of Mrs. Mallard's quest for freedom, and one as the author's denial of the possibility of women escaping patriarchal marriages; the story of Nora's departure is certainly inspiring, but where does Nora go after she leaves? Just as Eileen Chang said that the Chinese learned to "go away" from the play "Nora", but the next bigger question is where to go. To go to the windy land, to approach the sun, the moon, the mountains and the rivers is to go, to go upstairs is also to go, how to go? Where is the way out?"

Chopin gives an O'Henry-Esque negative answer at the end: death. In a patriarchal society, women who walk out of the home and into society will not find a true heterotopia; only death can lead them to true freedom. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf has used a similar technique to deal with the death of her characters. At the end of the novel, death descends silently, seen by Woolf as "an effort to communicate - death with the warmth of an embrace." This is both Mrs. Dalloway's perception of death and Woolf's attitude towards it, as she sees it as the only thing she can control, and she ultimately chooses to die in pursuit of her final freedom.[8]

From my perspective,on the one hand, Chopin's hesitation and criticism of the institution of marriage can be seen in the text, but also through her irony and distrust of Mrs. Mallard's quest for absolute freedom. This work is arguably not a purely "feminist text" in the traditional sense.There are many contradictions in her portrayal at the textual level, from her attitude towards death to her ambivalent attitude towards marriage, which is the opposite of the liberal feminist critique of patriarchal marriage presented earlier, but which shows the complexity of Chopin's attitude towards the "pursuit of freedom". But this does not detract from the complexity of the characters she presents in this novel. But to apply a feminist framework to this novel would take away from the complexity and depth of exploration that it should have.

As Professor Shen mentions: "How stereotypes of the author, theoretical frameworks and cultural contexts have led professional critics to put on tinted glasses and interpret the work in a preconceived way, whereas the article 'Gender Politics' shows us The article 'The Politics of Gender' shows us how a popular audience 'unaware of Chopin's writing and intellectual identity' can ignore the textual expression of the work itself and read it only according to the usual interpretive framework. In either case, this leads to the imposition of preconceptions on the work, an interpretive trap to be avoided."[9]

5.The meaning of women's writing

Mrs.Mallard does not achieve a greater breakthrough in the portrayal of women, but in a way she does, and perhaps this may not have been her real intention, but the moment she begins to write her own, to insert herself as the subject into the image of Mrs.Mallard, her reinvention and enrichment of"Mrs.Mallard" are complete."Her portrayal of Mrs.Mallard is not perfect, perhaps not a new image of the liberated woman-she torments and struggles repeatedly between the traditional woman and the liberal feminist, rejoicing in her freedom and unconsciously existing in her psyche as a result of the existing submissiveness to men. of subservience to men, and so there are many angles of irony to the protagonist's quest for celibacy and singleness. The complexity and subtlety of female self-expression are what make the image of Mrs.Mallard so valuable. This also confirms that only when women start writing can they break through the mirror of the male gaze, even though women's writing has long been regarded as"private writing", and women who go beyond the norm are often seen as"madwomen in the attic", their expressions being Their expression is pathologized. But fortunately, there are always women like Wanda Masoch、Kate Chopin who are brave enough to express their sorrow and their confusion about being a woman."Women's writing"is a subversion and counterpoint to the image of women in men's writing, bringing to light a world that has not been reflected in the mirror of men, through female narrators. This is how women's writing reshapes the image of women in men's writing, and this is how women's writing reappears in literature, which has long been lost in literature.

3.Conclusion

his paper believes that the ambivalence and"discordant tone" in Chopin's portrayal of the heroine is a real woman's struggle between the"traditional family angel" and the budding concept of"liberal feminism".We can neither fit it into the structure of a feminist narrative nor ignore the presence of Chopin's reflections on marriage for women's freedom.