Date of Award

5-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

English

Committee Chair/Advisor

Erin Goss

Committee Member

Clare Mullaney

Committee Member

Su Cho

Abstract

In examining Kate Chopin’s The Awakening alongside anthropologic theories of liminality, this paper examines the becoming women traverse as they transition between various social roles: girl, woman, mother. Edna is a maternal character attempting to unweave herself from her roles as mother and wife, and she finds this desire to go backwards to the freedom she experienced as a girl is proven to be impossible. The unmooring of her psyche and her subsequent suicide is indicative of a failure, not of her own accord, but in the social preparation and support she receives within her new identity. Social anthropologists further direct towards the concept of liminality as a result of extended periods of social isolation and rejection, and the term becomes necessary in the conversation of motherhood, as it notes these in-betweens as sites of tension, opening up conversations about the expectations of motherhood and how they are felt: socially, physically, and politically.

These social, physical and political implications of motherhood and female-driven community are complicated with the incorporation of creative nonfiction sections. The distance that is maintained in ethnographic and literary analysis is complicated by the experiential, and the intimacies of the mother-daughter relationship construct another in-between. The expectations of a mother under a Western patriarchal social structure are upheld to alienate and exploit, and yet, they have the power to maintain certain connections between women across various divides.

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