Lost Ladies, New Women: Narrative Voice and Female Identity in Willa Cather's A Lost Lady and Kate Chopin's The Awakening

Abstract

The impact of assigning gender to narrators, either by the author or reader, has recently become a point of interest in narratology. The increasing interest in gender, sexuality, and queer studies highlights gendered voices and their importance in narrative theory with its foundational questions that deal with who tells the story, why they tell it, and how it is told. The role of gendered and de-gendered narrators is particularly relevant to nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women's literature because this period simultaneously drew strict gender lines while questioning and even dismantling these identities. In their novels, Willa Cather and Kate Chopin explored New Woman themes such as independence, sexuality, and complicating traditional female gender roles. This thesis examines the roles gendered and de-gendered narrators play in the formation of the female characters' identities in Cather's A Lost Lady (1923) and Chopin's The Awakening (1899). Cather's male narrator unsuccessfully attempts to control his female protagonist, who nevertheless manages to maintain her autonomy as a New Woman throughout the novel. Chopin's de-gendered narrator is neither male nor female and remains impartial in its description of the protagonist. Whereas Cather's protagonist is certain of her identity, Chopin's ambiguous narrator reflects the protagonist's own uncertainty about her sense of self. By analyzing Cather's 1923 novel first, then looking backward to Chopin this study establishes critical questions posed by feminist narratology, addressing feminist scholars' concerns about The Awakening, and interpreting The Awakening's gender ambiguity by way of A Lost Lady's New Woman certainty.