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The awakening has spoken to women's issues across time in many corners of the world regardless of caste, faith, nationality. Being a semi-autobiographical American-Novel, The Awakening was a catharsis against the late-19th-century Victorian constraints on Southern American women. The text challenged the hold of Victorian shackles on women's social, personal, marital, and sexual rights. Although the text had poor critical reception in its own time, it was reaccredited in the 1950s. Since then, the novel has kept on enlightening its readers through its powerful female-characters across times and cultures. This study revisits how the text reflected women's individualism; how readers responded to it, and how it has contributed a change to women's position. The analogy also signifies the degree to which the study could encourage the suppressed women's voice in Pakistan against�social, personal, marital, sexual �injustices that are done to them under cultural shackles, religious romanticizing, and androcentric norms.

A social documentary of Dreiser's milieu and own life, Sister Carrie (1900) portrays American women from multiple angles. As a genuine criticism of debased American values, the text describes women's social, personal, sexual, marital, and economic sides of contemporary American women through Carrie. Having a poor critical reception in the 1910s, the novel was rediscovered worldwide with new vigor since the mid-20th-century for its potent feminist message. Like in other countries, its importance has been felt Pakistani academia, where it is psychologically preparing the emerging woman for the forthcoming SocialDarwinist challenges. This study rediscovers Sister Carrie through the lenses of New Historicism, Historical Reception, and Feminism: why Dreiser wrote it; how the public/critics received it; how it contributed a change to the women's position; and how it could strengthen women's role in Pakistan.