The story of Kate Chopin The Awakening and the story of Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper draws its power from two truths: First, each work presents itself as a political cry against injustice and against the socio/political problem. genesis of the modern feminist movement. Second, each text is the guardian of a new literary history. Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman seem to initiate a new phase in textual history where literary conventions are revised to serve an ideology representative of the "new" feminine presence. Two conventions in particular seem of central importance: “marriage” and “property”. Donald Keesey, editor of the critical collection Contexts for Criticism, describes "convention" for us as structural and plot devices, techniques of character representation, and a vast reservoir of images and symbols are conventions that most Western literature, at least, has in common. But like the conventions of language, they only make sense to those who have learned them (Keesey, 262). The literary convention is on the one hand the particular tool or an image; for example, “baptism” can be used as a literary convention. It is a “convention” because it entails a set of inferences, i.e. rebirth, renewal, awakening, initiation, etc. This relationship of signifier to signified is what Chopin and Gilman seek to revise in the conventions of “convenience”. and “marriage”. The previous definition of “convention” poses an important question to us, namely: “What if what existing conventions imply is insufficient?” What if, as in the case of Chopin and Gilman, the canon (as a reflection of society as a whole) has failed to recognize the female voice? As these authors have shown us, when this is the ...... middle of article ......ier. " New Essays on Awakening. Ed. Wendy Martin. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 89-106. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Yellow Wallpaper, The Feminist Press, 1973. Gilmore, Michael T. “Revolt Against Nature: the problematic modernism of awakening." Martin 59-84. Giorcelli, Cristina "The Wisdom of Edna: A Transition and. Martin 109-39. Keesey, Donald, Contexts for Criticism. Mayfield Publishing Company, 1994. Martin, Wendy, ed. New essays on awakening. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Papke, Mary E. On the Edge of the Abyss: The Social Fiction of Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton, CT: Greenwood, 1990. Seyersted, Per. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography: Louisiana State UP, 1969. Showalter, Elaine “Tradition and Female Talent.” : Awakening as a solitary book." Martin 33-55.