The Object of the Phallus: A Psychoanalytic Feminist Analysis of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth.

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 ninetee…