How Authorial Gender Influences the Portrayal of the Woman Michael Robles
When analyzing literature, one of the most important aspects to take into consideration is the perspective of the author. Recognizing the class, gender, ethnicity, and other aspects of the author allows readers to give thought to how their background is incorporated into the work. More importantly, the author’s background can have a major effect on how they portray characters, specifically of the opposite gender. The novel The Awakening by Kate Chopin is a famous example of how a female author wrote the personal awakening of a female character, and displays a sense of accuracy in the character of Edna Pontellier. However, the novella Daisy Miller by Henry James is a clear example of how an author of the male gender portrays a female character of similar qualities differently from that of a female author. Therefore, The Awakening and Daisy Miller show how gender differences influence the portrayal of the female gender. In The Awakening, the character of Edna Pontellier is written in two perspectives: in a tone more sympathetic for her role as a woman, and in a more neutral standpoint in the general role of the story. Kate Chopin assures to make the reader understand that Edna Pontellier is seen as a wife and mother more than as an independent being throughout the story. On page two, Kate Chopin even writes, “… looking at his [Leonce Pontellier] wife as one looks at a valuable piece of property which has suffered some damage,” (Chopin 2). In her introduction into the novel, Edna is immediately being compared to private property of her husband, thus showing the more raw theme of how women are to be considered property by their families and not their own person. Chopin recognizes this and immediately calls attention to it very early into the novel. Not only that, but her characterization is based on how women were treated in the nineteenth century. In his article “Women in the Nineteenth-Century America,” Graham Warder states, “Less a place of production than a spiritually sanctified retreat from the hurly-burly of economic life, the home was where women nurtured men and children into becoming morally elevated beings,” (Warder 2018). Women were expected to care for their husbands and children, and 61