The Development of Self in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Chopin's The Awakening, and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

Abstract

<p>This study is an examination of the developing self-consciousness of three female protagonists in three different novels. Chapter One is a discussion of the detrimental social factors that hinder the complete selfdevelopment of Hester Prynne in the seventeenth-century New England environment of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. Chapter Two investigates the emerging consciousness of self of Edna Pontellier and her subsequent failure to achieve an autonomy that permits her to integrate into the confining, social climate of Chopin's nineteenth-century Creole environment in The Awakening. Chapter three is the examination of the repressive forces in the futuristic society of Gilead that serve as a barrier to the development of a unified self for Offred in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. In all three chapters of the thesis, I argue that each female protagonist's struggle to successfully assert the self, and to extend the self toward genuine relationships with others, is not actualized. This study attempts to show the precarious hold of the self that the female protagonist demonstrates in each of these three works of fiction. Throughout the body of the text, an abbreviated form iii iv will be used for the three primary novels examined. The reference consists of the underlined initials of the title of the novel followed by the page number, all contained within parentheses. The abbreviations are as follows: TSL for Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, TA for Chopin's The Awakening, and THT for Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.</p>