مشخصات پژوهش

The proposed research holds significance for multiple domains within literary scholarship. First, it advances Chopin studies by supplying a theoretical synthesis that has not yet appeared in the field. Although scholars analyze The Awakening through feminist, psychoanalytic, historicist, and spatial lenses, no study coordinates Butler’s performative theory with Soja’s spatial trialectic to explain how gendered acts reshape environments and generate emergent subjectivities. This synthesis promises to enrich existing interpretations by clarifying the mechanics through which bodies alter social spaces. Such an approach builds on theoretical insights by Butler, Soja, Massey, and Lefebvre while also redefining the methodological landscape for American literary studies (Butler; Soja; Massey; Lefebvre). Second, the project advances fin-de-siècle scholarship by demonstrating that spatial dynamics serve as central engines of subject formation in American realism. Critics such as Mary Papke, Barbara Ewell, and Monika Elbert show that late nineteenth-century fiction configures domestic and leisure spaces as contested sites, yet they do not show how gendered acts produce new spatial orders (Papke; Ewell; Elbert). The present study reveals that such acts possess spatial force, thus reframing the period’s literature as a field where bodily conduct shapes the material and symbolic landscapes of modernity. Third, the project contributes to interdisciplinary debates about gender and space by offering an analytic model that scholars may apply to other texts. The model’s integration of performativity and thirdspace addresses broader concerns about how minorities and women negotiate constrained environments—a subject that intersects with criticism by Crenshaw, Nancy Fraser, and Dorothy Smith (Crenshaw; Fraser; Smith). The study therefore addresses a priority area: the analysis of embodied agency within spatial regimes that generate both oppression and possibility.