Evolution of Feminist Art

Academic LJ March

Nominated by Professor Amy Moellering

Art is a vessel for change. Art has been used since the beginning of time as a way for humans to express their ideas and beliefs, whether it’s been something that’s just for themselves, or something specifically meant to be shared with others. People have evolved in their forms of expression, from drawing on cave walls to going on to write film scripts and so much more. But not only have the forms of art evolved—their messages have too. With time and more media outlets spreading information, the public is able to digest more “radical” messages than they ever were before. Though these messages are not always received well by the masses, it is comforting to know that there are people who are brave enough to express them at all. The fight for gender equality has been going on for a long time, and it is not over; there is still so much art being made, and so much art to be made regarding it. But the focus of feminist art has shifted over time, as the fear of making others uncomfortable with one’s art is dissolving with time. A prominent pioneer of feminism is Kate Chopin, a woman who published many feminist works of literature in the 1800s, such as her novella The Awakening and her short story “The Story of an Hour.” Both of these stories depict women who are in marriages that they don’t want to be in, and neither feels free and alive until they are no longer a part of these marriages. These stories gave voices to women who hadn’t been able to say anything at the time. The conversation that was started by those stories and other feminist works kept going, and it has evolved greatly since. Now, light is finally shed on topics that have been kept in the dark for centuries, especially sexual assault, and the 2020 film Promising Young Woman is a powerful example. The film depicts a woman named Cassie who frequently goes out to bars to pretend that she is extremely drunk, and then she waits for a man to come to try to take advantage of her. She is successful at every attempt, and she terrifies each man when he discovers that she’s actually completely sober (Fennell). Chopin’s works The Awakening and “The Story of an Hour,” and the movie Promising Young Woman are stories from vastly different time periods, but all of them contain unfortunately similar dark endings for women. All of these stories work to convey how the objectification of and lack of credibility for women in this society still make it easier to not live in it.

Objectification of women has been present throughout history, and it is still unfortunately highly prevalent today. Chopin explores objectification in both The Awakening and “The Story of an Hour” through the protagonists Edna and Louise’s characters. Both of these women are trapped in marriages they do not want to be in, but they cannot do anything about. Divorce was severely frowned upon in the 1800s, so there wasn’t escape through it for Edna or Louise. They also had to get married in the first place thanks to the double standard that men didn’t have to get married, but if women didn’t get married, then they were looked down upon and called a spinster. Men were seen as people who didn’t have to get married, and women were seen as objects to be married, and also have children. In The Awakening, when Edna is speaking to her friend Madame Ratignolle regarding her feelings about what she would give up for her children, she states, “I would give up the unessential; I would give up my money, I would give up my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me” (Chopin 90). Edna has not recognized the objectification she has been subject to in her life until recently, which is why she says that this is something that she is only “beginning to comprehend.” She is finally recognizing her self-worth, “awakening” to the fact that there is more to her life than living it for other people. She sees money as unessential, and she sees her life as unessential—she would die for her children if she had to, because she loves them. But she would not live for them, as that is essential. She cannot be treated as an object, inanimate and dead, even for her children. Nothing is ever worth being seen as an object for one’s whole life; therefore, she realizes that she

must die in order to avoid objectification since it will always be present as long as she lives in this society. Today, society is more explicit about all the facets of objectification, one of them being sexual assault. In Promising Young Woman, Nina is videotaped in front of a large group of men at a party as she gets raped, and nobody does anything about it (Fennell). She is not treated as a person, or seen as one by anybody there: she is seen as an object for sex. A drunk, lifeless body for men to do whatever they want with, and laugh at as they do. No human being deserves to be treated that way, but none of them care. The same goes for the treatment of Cassie: she goes out to bars and a man finds her, and then treats her like an object as well. They try to get her drunker sometimes, and they all want to take her home to use her for sex. None of them care about her or any of her needs, and there is never a single good man who actually sees her as a human being. She never ceases to be found by a man who wants to abuse her because so many men in the world see women as objects. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, “For the period 1995–2013, females ages 18 to 24 had the highest rate of rape and sexual assault victimizations compared to females in all other age groups” (Langton). Rape is most common for women, especially college-age women, so it makes sense that rape/sexual assault would be such a prominent topic in modern feminist art, such as films. Sexual violence against women has always been happening, but society has had to evolve over time to slowly become more comfortable with difficult subjects, especially regarding the struggles faced by women, so though Chopin was not able to speak up about it in her work, it is comforting to know that women like Emerald Fennell are able to do so now in this day and age.

Another topic explored in these works is a lack of credibility for women. As stated in Feminist Theory and Literary Practice by professor of American Literature Deborah L. Madsen, “[I]n the nineteenth century a woman in America was unable to vote, and after marriage had no control of her property . . . or her children. Nor could she make a will, sign a contract, or instigate legal proceedings without her husband’s consent. Her status was akin to that of a minor or a slave” (Madsen 3). Women were not treated like adults, and they were simply not free to have basic rights. They were not trusted to do anything like an adult, and neither were Edna nor Louise. As Louise imagines what the future holds for her without her husband alive anymore, Chopin narrates, “There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination” (Chopin 101). The fact that she will no longer have a “powerful will bending hers” anymore means that she will no longer be controlled by a man, her husband. She can finally stop being treated like a child with him dead, and she can do anything she wants in the world, much unlike her life before, in which this was absolutely not the case. She knows that her husband did not have a “cruel” intention; it was not specifically his fault that she was treated like a child, but it was the fault of society as a whole’s treatment towards women that made the act of their marriage a “crime,” because the marriage literally stole Louise’s life from her, and she was essentially just a dead woman walking around with no life in her since she had zero credibility. This lack of credibility faced for women has continued into the present day, especially when it comes to coming out about sexual assault. In Promising Young Woman, Nina tells the school and the authorities who raped her, and when and where, and she is not believed at all. Her rapist still continues to be able to walk around school, and other students also call her a liar for it, or tell her that she is overreacting about what happened. It makes sense why there is such a high percentage of sexual assaults that go unreported to authorities—specifically eighty percent of them for female college students (Langton). Why would someone come out about being sexually assaulted if nothing will come from their report besides ridicule and disrespect? That’s all that Nina gets, and it’s all that so many women get for coming out with their experience. A lot of the time, telling others about their experience being sexually assaulted only makes things worse for the survivor: they can be blamed, told that it was their fault—it was what they were wearing, what they were drinking, what they did or did not do. So many people are completely blind to the fact that the blame should only go to

the perpetrator, the person who actually committed the horrific act. This lack of credibility makes it incredibly difficult for people to speak up about their experience with sexual assault, and it can be detrimental for someone to keep quiet about something like that.

All of these different stories have a starkly disturbing commonality: suicide is used by women as a path to freedom from a world dominated by men, from the 1800s to 2020. Both of Chopin’s stories focus on a woman who has considered suicide in order to be free. In The Awakening, Edna ends up purposely drowning herself in the ocean in order to be free since she knows that she cannot live for herself in the society she is trapped in; she can only live for her husband and children, but she can choose to die for herself. In “The Story of an Hour,” Louise feels utterly lifeless until she hears the news of her husband’s death, which livens her, as she believes that she can finally stop living for him and now actually live for herself. Just the day before hearing of her husband’s death, she “had thought with a shudder that life might be long,” but once she learns of his death, she “breathe[s] a quick prayer that life might be long” (Chopin 101). Louise did not want to live a long life while being married to her husband, because she did not even view that as living. But she has a real will to live once she learns that he is dead, which speaks volumes about the state of women in the 1800s, who were forced to be in marriages with men they had no desire to be with. This made death seem much more attractive than life for women at the time. In Promising Young Woman, the act of Nina’s suicide is an attempt at escaping a life that has been ruined by men, particularly Al because he raped her, but also by the other men who watched the rape happen and did nothing to stop it, or defend her when she spoke up about it later. The people in our society unfortunately have a sense instilled in them to not initially believe rape survivors, and even if they do come to accept the truth of a sexual assault, to instead forgivingly see the typical perpetrator as a “promising young man” such as in Brock Turner’s case, and never the woman as a “promising young woman.” (Not to say that every perpetrator is male, or that every victim is female, but I am putting it this way because this is the most common situation, as Langton’s statistics show.) If Nina had been believed, she could definitely still be alive. But she wasn’t believed, and Al was never punished for raping her. This led Nina to feel alone in an unjust world that does not believe women or allow them to live honestly, and therefore she felt like she could not live in this world at all, much like Edna and Louise, and even Cassie who came to the same conclusion herself when she ended up crafting the plan that led to her death, which was, in a way, her own suicide.

By examining the evolution of feminist art from the 1800s to 2020, one can see that a lot has changed for women, as they are now able to speak out on issues that they were forced to be silent about for centuries. But what’s also evident in this examination is the fact that women are still struggling to the point of not even wanting to be a part of this world anymore because it’s much easier to be absent from it. Objectification has not disappeared, and neither has a lack of credibility for women. Hopefully, the continuation of feminist art will create more change by shedding even more light on the darkest of subjects, and we can someday create a future void of misogyny—a world that women want to live in.

Chopin, Kate. “The Awakening and Other Writings.” Google Books, Google, 2011, books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=gAetnMN062MC&oi=fnd&pg=PA7&dq=the%2Bawakening%2Bkate%2Bchopin&ots=n-4z12LjB8&sig=SMC5CR8uGXH3nbJQsSIt9ZnBIO0#v=onepage&q=the%20awakening%20kate%20chopin&f=false.

Chopin, Kate. “The Story of an Hour,” The Seagull Reader. W.W. Norton & Co., 2015.

Fennell, Emerald, director. Promising Young Woman. 2020.

Langton, Lynn; Sinozich, Sofi. “Rape and Sexual Assault Among College-Age Females, 1995-2013.” Office of Justice Programs, www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/rape-and-sexual-assault-among-college-age-f

emales-1995-2013.

Madsen, Deborah L. “Feminist Theory and Literary Practice.” Google Books, Pluto Press, 20 Aug. 2000, books.google.com/books?id=moZZDDFAFvsC&dq=kate%2Bchopin%2Bfeminist&lr=&source=gbs_ navlinks_s.