Contextualizing Gender’s Role in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh: A Comparative Historical Study

Abstract

This study, through a new historicist comparative approach, strives to explore the dynamics of women in marriages and in friendships for Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh. Although Chopin’s novel was written in 1899 and Alsanea’s in 2005, both received harsh condemnation and rejection in newspapers and book reviews when they were published, emphasizing gender`s role in both cultures. By explaining the reciprocal relationships between the texts and the newspaper reviews, and ephemera, this paper adds to scholarly understanding of how the newspapers and the critics` reflection for a certain literary text, as a human constant, can describe the gender segregation of the context`s time. Using textual analyses in the form of close readings of the female characters’ interactions with their partners and other women, and the struggle and experience of each women in both novels in terms of marriage, this paper will demonstrate links between the thoughts of critics as context and the novel as a creative historical output as both writers deftly caused great social discussions for change.