| dc.description.abstract | Much scholarly attention has been paid to the patriarchal constraints governing the lives of women. In this context, the role of discourse in the formation of representations of women is seminal to the feminist cause. The psychoanalytic feminists Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva claim, within their distinct theories on sexual difference, that prevailing phallocentric sets of representation and knowledge directly influence discursive constructions of sexual identity. Enlightened by the above, this thesis aims to perform a psychoanalytic feminist analysis of the role of Western phallocentric discourse in woman’s repression. To that end, this thesis proposes a comparison of the way the nineteenth century ‘feminine ideal’ is depicted in two novels: namely The Awakening, by the American Kate Chopin, and Ruth, by the British Elizabeth Gaskell. Centred around female protagonists, these canonical books offer an intimate view of how the protagonists relate to the feminine societal identities they are assigned. As ‘the object of the phallus’, these women are invited to embody men’s own repressed desires overflown onto the free reigns of the patriarchal discourse of the time. However, it will be demonstrated that their positionings in relation to the Western phallocentric discourse are opposite. If Edna works to defy the confining discourses around the ‘feminine’, Ruth succumbs to the representations offered to her in the hope to find a place back into patriarchy. Regardless of the direction in relation to patriarchy, both protagonists demonstrate how Western phallocentric discourses indeed restricted the nineteenth-century woman’s ability to access her subjectivity. | |
