A Comparative Analysis of the Motives behind the Female Suicides in "King Lear" by William Shakespeare and "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin

This work sets out to study the spoken words of Gonerill in Shakespeare’s King Lear and of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening written by American writer Kate Chopin in 1899. The aim of this paper is to examine the motives for the two characters’ suicides. The project uses literary theory for this purpose. The techniques of deconstruction are used to reveal the forces at work beneath the text. Feminist literary criticism provides the mental framework for processing the findings. The results are used to compare the causes for female suicide at the turn of 17th century England to those of affluent women at the end of the 19th century in New Orleans. The degree to which women’s issues have remained the same over this period of time is the main question being asked by this study.