Freedom and Desire: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin

Abstract

Two books appeared in the last two years of the nineteenth century, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898), that were destined to become classics of modern feminist thought and sensibility. Both books, one an exquisitely written novel about woman’s sexual and psychological ‘awakening’ and the other an important economic and sociological treatise on the status of women, are major intellectual sources of modern feminism. Landmarks in the drive toward the liberation of women, the books describe the exclusion of women from the rhetoric and ideology of consensus. However, while Chopin and Gilman are revolutionary in their examinations of women, they are also interesting for their differences. They evince radically contrasting perspectives on how women can achieve freedom in the modern era. For Gilman women’s liberation can be gained only through major reform of the social and economic structures that influence behavior. Even in her classic psychological story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, she maintains that individual psychology and internal emotional states are reflections of the external social environment and of oppressive ideological systems of belief. Basically she sees desire as an enemy of women on the road to freedom.