1.

Introduction (female situation)

The time of Romanticism is historically regarded as a masculine phenomenon. As Anne K. Mellor pointed out, Romanticism as a literary movement
was constructed and defined by a masculine discourse and ideology, a masculine Romanticism. 1 This masculine Romanticism is the traditional
understanding of the literary movement based on the writings and thoughts of the five canonical writers Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley,
and Keats. Mellor suggests that feminine Romanticism occurs to recover the erased and neglected voices of women writers within this
movement.2 To understand these differences of masculine and feminine Romanticism, one has to realize that both terms serve as an ideological
gender construction, not in terms of the authors sex. To analyse female romantic literature also means to consider the division of private and
public sphere occuring in the eighteenth century, a phenomenon that should be discussed in the following chapter. 3

This paper aims to show how women writers could made a career in the male-dominated time of Romanticism. In order to show the problems they
experienced within a patriarchal society, I will explore the subordination of women by a construction of femininity which did not grant them the
status of rational thinking subjects. For this purpose I have chosen the example of Mary Wollstonecraft, the revolutionary founder of feminism.
Wollstonecraft was not only a writer herself, but she was also the wife of the well-known political philosopher, William Godwin, and she gave birth
to Mary Godwin Shelley, the famous author of Frankenstein. As a member of the literary circle around Joseph Johnson, she was surrounded by
famous contemporary writers and was involved in literary relationships within her own family circle.

My main intention is to show how Wollstonecraft as a woman writer could establish a space for herself in the public sphere of her contemporary
culture while she somehow used or even undermined the boundaries of masculine Romanticsim. For this purpose, I will only discuss her most
important works which constitute significant stages in her personal and literary development. I will therefore left out her novels, because prose
fiction, as the proper genre for women writers, was not her medium. Hers was a philosophical, though not always logical, mind. For that, I will
rather focus on her political and educational tracts, such as her two Vindications.

I think it is necessary to focus in detail on her biography in order to show the personal background which lead her to write her works. Important
questions to ask are how Wollstonecraft negotiated the activity of writing within her social sphere and what kind of support she received. How did
she experience her gender, her time, and the contemporary events, and how were these experiences reflected in her works?

I will further focus on gender politics controlled by patriarchy which excluded women because of their lack of education and I will discuss how the
call for gender equality by Mary Wollstonecraft was complicated by the society she lived in. At last, I will also explore how Mary Wollstonecraft as a
women writer of the eighteenth century represented herself through writing in order to achieve emancipation and a position as a rational thinking
being.

2. Norms, conventions and the problem of female

authorship
In this chapter, I will focus on the problems of female authorship during the Romantic era. Therefore I will explain womens role at this particular
time and describe the kind of obstacles female authors experienced as well as the possibilities they had in terms of creating a literary identity.

Women at that time were born into a realm of implicit subservience, and they were aware of the public world as difficult and mostly inimical to their
aspirations. Through detailed household tasks, they preserved the fabric of ordinary life. They had to care for the young, watched over the sick and
dying, supported other women in childbirth. Birth and death were held within the world of women. 4Their role was mainly restricted to domesticity
where they had their place.

By] force of circumstances the women writers, primarily middle-class, struggled with the constraints of a society that demanded female passivity
and that viewed their writings as violations of its codes of propriety. At the same time, they confronted self-imposed constraints generated by their
participation in and conditioning by the patriarchal regime into which women were born.

As a result, the social pressures that affected women literary or not consisted mainly in the pressure to conform to certain patterns of ideal
womanhood. In the eighteenth century, it was considered improper for a woman to write publicly, and if she did, she was rather judged as a
woman, not as a writer.5 If she refused to be modest, self-deprecating, subservient, refused to present her artistic productions as mere trifles
designed to divert and distract readers in moments of idleness, she could expect to be ignored or (sometimes scurrilously) attacked. 6 As I will
show in the case of Mary Wollstonecraft, her early works and life are characterized by two conflicting desires: On the one hand, she

Writing in order to publish was against feminine propriety, because it cultivated and called attention to the woman as subject, as a person who
wanted to deserve notice for her own sake. 7 If a woman writer did not publish her works pseudonymously or anonymously 8, she could modestly
confess her female limitations and concentrate on the lesser subjects reserved for ladies as becoming to their inferior powers. 9 If the latter
alternative failed, she could rebel, accepting the inevitable ostracism. As Virginia Woolf observed, the woman writer seemed locked into a double
bind: she had to choose between admitting she was only a woman or protesting that she was as good as a man. 10

To say it short, the literary woman faced equally degrading options when she had to define her public presence in the world. Of course, Mary
Wollstonecraft was not the first woman to try to support herself through writing. Women who did publish under their own names almost always
sought to justify their efforts as financially necessary preferably, to the support of a family.
The period during which Wollstonecraft wrote constituted a critical phase in the history of bourgeois ideology. The French Revolution represented a
dramatic symbol of economic and social changes that seemed to threaten England as well. As such, it provoked both explicit challenges to the
political inequality inherent in English patriarchal society and adamant defenses of the whole system. 11

It was the time when Wollstonecraft and others made the issue of sexual equality a part of this political and ethical debate, encouraged to a new
self-consciousness about the social hierarchy that seemed for so long a part of nature itself. As Mary Poovey argues, the real antagonists to this
way of life were already invisibly at work in the form of eceonomic development and within the very ideology of capitalist individualism. 12

The social order based on patronage gradually gave way to the practices and pressures of individualism. As a consequence, women in particular
found their situation unusual, when they were now being asked to prevent the remnants of the old society within the private sphere of home. Mary
Wollstonecrafts response to this period of social and ideological turmoil is perhaps most evident in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, where
she identified many of the ideological contradictions responsible for womens political, social, and psychological dependence.

In Mary Wollstonecrafts lifetime the learned discourses and noble genres were conventionally reserved for men, both as practitioners and as
readers. They included abstract writings such as philosophy or science, scholarly writing and the noble genres such as tragedy and epic. By
contrast, most women writers kept to things of writing that could be seen as extensions of womens domestic range of education and
experience.13 These were useful and practical subjects, including eduational writing and books for children, conduct books for girls and young
women, poems of domestic life and subjective experience, and prose fiction, the most popular womens genre in the later eighteenth century.

Successful or not, women writers of this time found ways to take part in the literary field, although the literary market was still mans domain. In
Mary Wollstonecraft we probably find the best example of a women writer who refused to adopt herself fully to the traditional gender roles, who
acted against eighteenth century conventions and challenged the entire male-dominated (literary) world. The feminist theory sees its purpose in
challenging the assessment of positions and experiences of women, as well as society and social interaction by male bias. It supports womens
rights as well as linked issues. Furthermore it criticises unequal social relations. The understanding of particular social behaviour, the awareness of
male dominance and the observation of a situation through various angles and viewpoints

3. The marriage contract and its sociocultural impact

in the novel
Strictly speaking, Edna has never entered into a genuine contract with her husband. Her very marriage originally served as a protest against her
family, Kentucky Presbyterians whose narrow-mindedness and rigour are personified in her father. After having strived for a passionate
relationship as it is indicated by her former attraction to the cavalry officer, the young gentleman and the tragedian, she met her husband:"Her
marriage to Lonce Pontellier was purely an accident" (18) the narrator laconically comments, at the same time stressing that she left the "realm of
romance and dreams" (19) forever. Mr Pontellier, on the other hand, regards their matrimony as being based neither on mutual love nor on
passion, but on a quasi-commercial contract that entitles him to treat Edna as one of his material possessions, [3] "looking at his wife as one looks
at a valuable piece of property which has suffered some damage" (4). [4]

Remarkably, he is not a rude husband who insists on his 'rights' to his property; he even con sults a doctor rather than trying to coerce Edna, which
is what her father recommends. Thus, the contract between the two is based on inequality and, more fundamentally, on misunder standing. Not
only does Lonce dominate, as can be expected in a patriarchal structure, but he also wants Edna to face the reality of bringing up children and of
fulfilling social duties, whereas she keeps entertaining her romantically idealized childhood notions. The opposition here is one between social and
economic agreement on the one hand and romance and passion on the other.

Unfortunately, the protagonist "fancied there was a sympathy of thought and taste between them, in which fancy she was mistaken" (18). These
diametrically opposed concepts of marital union lead to conflicts which are enhanced by the fact that Edna, being a woman in a male-do minated
culture, has considerable difficulty finding adequate means of articulating herself and of acting accordingly. [5] Paradoxically, her marriage, which
was originally meant to be an act of rebellion, induces her to rebel against it, in turn. The reason is that Edna cannot live up to her illusion that she
will turn into a respectable matron after the wedding:"in short, Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman" (9). It is exactly the link between the roles
of wife and mother in the marriage contract which constitutes a grave problem for her, as can be seen in her husband's continual (if not always
unjustified) reproaches that she does not take sufficient care of the children. Her volatile behaviour, hugging them at one moment and neglecting
them at the next, is a point in case; she is glad not just about Lonce's absence, but also about theirs. The estrangement is revealed in Edna's
response to Mme. Ratignolle's critical comment on Mr. Pontellier going to his club: "What should I do if he stayed home? We wouldn't have
anything to say to each other" (66).

In Kate Chopin's The Awakening, sexuality, love and marriage are negotiated in connection with the problem of a uniquely female identity which
[1]
defies the ideas of Victorian prudery and seeks to represent the "new woman". But what precisely is the nature of Edna's awakening? Does the
novel really convey a feminist tenor, and does Chopin succeed in exploring new cul tural and social options in the sphere of fiction? Three major
aspects have to be analysed to illuminate this matter, namely adultery, the notion of contract and the question of a female iden tity, all of which are
directly linked to the organization and stability of society in general and in American society by the end of the nineteenth century in particular.
Considering the ubiquity of adultery - seen as a transgression against the marriage contract - in nineteenth-century novels, Tony Tanner postulates
"relationships between a specific kind of sexual act, a specific kind of society, and a specific kind of narrative" (1979: 12), all of which here imply a
definition of woman's role on a social scale.