The Story of Kate Chopin The Awakening and the Story of Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wallpaper draw their power from two truths: first, each work represents a political cry against the injustice and at the socio/political level the genesis of the modern feminist movement. Secondly, each text is the custodian of a new literary history. Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman appear to begin a new phase in textual history in which literary conventions are revised to serve an ideology representative of the "new" female presence. Two conventions in particular seem of central importance: "marriage" and "property". Donald Keesey, editor of the critical collection Contexts for Criticism, describes for us "convention" as devices of structure and plot, techniques of character representation, and a vast reservoir of images and symbols are conventions that at least most Western literatures have in common. But like the conventions of language, they only have meaning to those who have learned them (Keesey, 262). The literary convention is on the one hand the particular instrument or image; for example, "baptism" can be used as a literary convention. It is a "convention" because it carries with it a set of inferences, i.e. rebirth, renewal, awakening, initiation, etc. This relationship of the signifier to the signified is what Chopin and Gilman seek to revise in the conventions of "property" and "marriage." The above definition of "convention" leaves us with an important question, 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 at large ) couldn't recognize the female voice?" As these authors have shown us, when such is the... center of the paper... more." New Essays on The 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 Numinous Fusion.” 109-39.Keesey, Donald, Contexts for Criticism. Mayfield Publishing Company, 1994.Martin, Wendy, ed. New Essays on the Awakening. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.Papke, Mary E. Verging on the Abyss: The Social Fiction by Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton, CT: Greenwood, 1990.Seyersted, For Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography: Louisiana State UP, 1969.Showalter, Elaine: The Awakening as a Lonely Book.” Martin 33-55.