EXPLICATING FEMALE BODY AS A GEOGRAPHY OF MEMORY: THE COMPARATIVE SILENT REBELLION OF THE PSYCHE IN CHOPIN AND HAWTHORNE

What is both ideological and magical about ‘memory’ is the fact that it is both singular

and plural which acts as a bridge between the personal and the collective. The example of

that kind of a bridge is especially represented through literature. In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet

Letter (1850) and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), the female body is used as a text to

reflect both cultural and personal memory and to define how ‘memory’ is tried to be shaped

by the society. One of America’s first mass-published books, The Scarlet Letter’s protagonist

Hester Prynne illuminates the geography of the female body that rebels against the cultural

memory through wearing the letter ‘A’ on her gown at all times that signifies ‘adultery.’

On the other hand, her silent rebellion has achieved to transform the letter ‘A’ into ‘Angel,’

‘Artist,’ ‘Art,’ and ‘Able’ that is the declaration of independence of the personal memory

over the cultural. Like Hester, in order to escape from the limitations of the cultural memory,

Edna Pontellier in The Awakening rebels against cultural memory and learns to swim in the

ocean and focuses on art which immediately overlap the definition of her role in life. The

comparative analysis of both of the works underline the fact that the female body has been

used as a geography of cultural memory throughout the history. However, Hester and Edna

are significant for the fact that, the psychic device of both women is a silent rebellion which

creates a social space to fight against cultural memory.