As a comment on the resolution to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, an anonymous figure once stated, “A defeat and a regression, rooted in a self-annihilating instinct, in a romantic incapacity to accommodate to the limits of reality.” The main protagonist of The Awakening, Edna Pontellier, is initially met with joy and excitement with her transition from complacency and dissatisfaction to newfound independence and self-expression. However, as the anonymously declared statement implies, signs that appear throughout the story point towards a sort of self-annihilation to come, which in fact did come in the form of Edna’s implied death. Three main factors foreshadow a premature end to Edna’s ecstatic behavior and newly awakened persona: her random and sudden moments of despair and depression; her desire to escape the reality of things, most particularly from responsibilities; and her susceptibility and vulnerability to love and passion.
Perhaps the most alarming indicators of Edna’s eventual watery suicide are those moments during which she is seized by a sudden sense of despair. In Chapter III, after Leonce comes home and falls asleep, Edna goes into the porch, and the narrator paints her emotional state in this way: “An indescribable oppression[…]filled her whole being with a vague anguish[….] It was strange and unfamiliar: it was a mood,” (Chopin, 8). Another instance is when Edna holds a dinner-party at the Pontellier manor in celebration of her move to the “pigeon-house.” As this is a night of celebration, it would be natural to assume that Edna is enjoying herself. Yet, the narrator describes a peculiar moment during this dinner-party: “But as she sat there amid her guests, she felt the old ennui overtaking her; the hope...
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...Reisz (Chopin, 86-87). This is a prime example of Edna’s vulnerability to love; her emotions are controlled by her “lover’s” presence and lack thereof, influencing and even worsening her sudden moments of dread and despair. Also, Edna succumbs to seduction by Alcee Arobin’s charm, first with a kiss (Chopin, 112) and then through sleeping with Arobin (Chopin, 125). Edna’s adulterous actions with Arobin are representative of the independent will she now possesses and has displayed in the past in her attempts to escape reality. In a way, her “affair” with Arobin is a way for her to escape the reality that she is “alone” back home without Robert alongside her. As such, Edna’s susceptibility to passion and love influences her sudden depressive moods and fear of her reality, thereby contributing to her “defeat and[…]regression.”
Works Cited
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
We are told there are days when she "was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with sunlight.." On such days Edna "found it good to be alone and unmolested." Yet on other days, she is molested by despondencies so severe that "...
Leonce Pontellier, the husband of Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening, becomes very perturbed when his wife, in the period of a few months, suddenly drops all of her responsibilities. After she admits that she has "let things go," he angrily asks, "on account of what?" Edna is unable to provide a definite answer, and says, "Oh! I don't know. Let me along; you bother me" (108). The uncertainty she expresses springs out of the ambiguous nature of the transformation she has undergone. It is easy to read Edna's transformation in strictly negative terms‹as a move away from the repressive expectations of her husband and society‹or in strictly positive terms‹as a move toward the love and sensuality she finds at the summer beach resort of Grand Isle. While both of these moves exist in Edna's story, to focus on one aspect closes the reader off to the ambiguity that seems at the very center of Edna's awakening. Edna cannot define the nature of her awakening to her husband because it is not a single edged discovery; she comes to understand both what is not in her current situation and what is another situation. Furthermore, the sensuality that she has been awakened to is itself not merely the male or female sexuality she has been accustomed to before, but rather the sensuality that comes in the fusion of male and female. The most prominent symbol of the book‹the ocean that she finally gives herself up to‹embodies not one aspect of her awakening, but rather the multitude of contradictory meanings that she discovers. Only once the ambiguity of this central symbol is understood can we read the ending of the novel as a culmination and extension of the themes in the novel, and the novel regains a...
Sacrifices can define one’s character; it can either be the highest dignity or the lowest degradation of the value of one’s life. In The Awakening, Kate Chopin implicitly conveys the sacrifice Edna Pontellier makes in the life which provides insight of her character and attributions to her “awakening.” She sacrificed her past of a lively and youthful life and compressed it to a domestic and reserved lifestyle of housewife picturesque. However, she meets multiple acquaintances who help her express her dreams and true identity. Mrs. Pontellier’s sacrifice established her awakening to be defiant and drift away from the societal role of an obedient mother, as well as, highlighting the difference between society’s expectations of women and women’s
Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” is wrought with symbolism, foreshadowing and careful diction choices. Many of the passages throughout the novel embody Edna’s awakening sense of self-reliance, independence and sexuality. These are sy...
We first meet Edna on her way back from a swim with Robert Lebrun, as Chopin begins to establish Edna’s burgeoning transformation in the context of her relationship with Robert and to the sea. While Robert and Edna’s relationship develops, Edna becomes increasingly dissatisfied with her marriage to Léonce Pontellier and her traditional roles as wife and mother to her two children, Rauol and Etienne. Edna learns to swim, takes up painting, befriends Madame Reisz, an eccentric old woman that plays the piano, and moves into her own house. After Robert leaves for Mexico, she engages in an affair with Alceé Arobin, until Robert returns and they affirm their love for one another. However, Robert, afraid of the social repercussions of their affair, leaves town. As a result of losing Robert, failing to find fulfillment in her life without a man, and failing to reconcile her roles as a good and faithful wife and mother while becoming an artist and falling in love, Edna commits suicide by drowning herself in the sea.
She desperately wanted a voice and independence. Edna’s realization of her situation occurred progressively. It was a journey in which she slowly discovered what she was lacking emotionally. Edna’s first major disappointment in the novel was after her husband, Leonce Pontellier, lashed out at her and criticized her as a mother after she insisted her child was not sick. This sparked a realization in Edna that made here realize she was unhappy with her marriage. This was a triggering event in her self discovery. This event sparked a change in her behavior. She began disobeying her husband and she began interacting inappropriately with for a married woman. Edna increasingly flirted with Robert LeBrun and almost instantly became attracted to him. These feelings only grew with each interaction. Moreover, when it was revealed to Edna that Robert would be leaving for Mexico she was deeply hurt not only because he didn’t tell her, but she was also losing his company. Although Edna’s and Robert’s relationship may have only appeared as friendship to others, they both secretly desired a romantic relationship. Edna was not sure why she was feeling the way she was “She could only realize that she herself-her present self-was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored
Throughout The Awakening, the reader follows Edna Pontellier as she becomes increasingly restless and discontented with her life. In Depression and Chopin’s The Awakening, Steven T. Ryan explains the parallels of Edna’s actions and inactions with depression. He writes:
In Kate Chopin's, The Awakening, Edna Pontellier came in contact with many different people during a summer at Grand Isle. Some had little influence on her life while others had everything to do with the way she lived the rest of her life. The influences and actions of Robert Lebrun on Edna led to her realization that she could never get what she wanted, which in turn caused her to take her own life.
In Kate Chopin's The Awakening, the principal character, Edna decides to kill herself rather than to live a lie. It seemed to Kate that the time of her own death was the only thing remaining under her control since society had already decided the rest of her life for her. Edna was a woman of the wrong times; she wanted her independence and she wanted to be with her lover, Robert. This type of behavior would never be accepted by the society of her time. Edna's relationship with Robert, and her rejection of the role dictated to her by society, resulted in her perceiving suicide to be the only solution to her problems.
At the beginning of the novel when Edna's husband, Leonce Pontellier, returns from Klein's hotel, he checks in on the children and believing that one of them has a fever he tells his wife, Edna. She says that the child was fine when he went to bed, but Mr. Pontellier is certain that he isn't mistaken: "He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children." (7) Because of the reprimand, Edna goes into the next room to check on the children. "She soon came back and sat on the edge of the bed, leaning her head down on the pillow…. She began to cry a little, and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her peignoir." (7) This is the first incident in which we see Edna's depression. At first, it doesn't seem like it is that significant, but Edna then goes out and sits on the porch and cries some more: " The tears came so fast to Mrs. Pontellier's eyes that the damp sleeve of her peignoir refused to dry them…. Turning, she trust her face, steaming and wet into the bend of her arm and went on crying there, not caring any longer to dry her face, her eyes, her arms. She could not have told you why she was crying." (7-8)
The possibility of a life beyond the scope of motherhood, social custom, standards of femininity, and wifedom characterize Kate Chopin’s vision of her heroine’s awakening, but Edna’s personal growth remains stifled by her inability to reconcile the contradictory impulses pulling her in different directions. Edna clearly envisions herself somewhere between mother-goddess figure Adele Ratignolle and the artist-spinster Mademoiselle Reisz, yet can not seem to negotiate a space that affords the luxury of love unspoiled by self-sacrifice and obligation. Edna’s “soul” surfaces when she allows herself to act on impulse over duty, but as Chopin’s words reveal, Mrs. Pontellier blindly fol...
Unlike the other women of Victorian society, Edna is unwilling to suppress her personal identity and desires for the benefit of her family. She begins “to realize her position in the universe as a human being and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her” (35). Edna’s recognition of herself as an individual as opposed to a submissive housewife is controversial because it’s unorthodox. When she commits suicide it’s because she cannot satisfy her desire to be an individual while society scorns her for not following the traditional expectations of women. Edna commits suicide because she has no other option. She wouldn’t be fulfilled by continuing to be a wife and a mother and returning to the lifestyle that she...
The fact that Edna is an artist is significant, insofar as it allows her to have a sensibility as developed as the author's. Furthermore, Edna is able to find in Mlle. Reisz, who has established herself as a musician, a role model who inspires her in her efforts at independence. Mlle. Reisz, in confiding to Edna that "You are the only one worth playing for," gives evidence of the common bond which the two of them feel as women whose sensibilities are significantly different from those of the common herd. The French heritage which Edna absorbed through her Creole upbringing allowed her, like Kate Chopin herself, to have knowledge or a way of life that represented a challenge to dominant Victorian conventions.
During the late nineteenth century, the time of protagonist Edna Pontellier, a woman's place in society was confined to worshipping her children and submitting to her husband. Kate Chopin's novel, The Awakening, encompasses the frustrations and the triumphs in a woman's life as she attempts to cope with these strict cultural demands. Defying the stereotype of a "mother-woman," Edna battles the pressures of 1899 that command her to be a subdued and devoted housewife. Although Edna's ultimate suicide is a waste of her struggles against an oppressive society, The Awakening supports and encourages feminism as a way for women to obtain sexual freedom, financial independence, and individual identity.
The irony of the story is the Edna learns how to swim ,yet she used the sea to take her own life. When the author states’ “But it was too late, the shore was far behind her, and her strength was gone. She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant then sank again”(135). In this quote the author ,Chopin, chose to show irony to end Edna’s character because Edna had faced her fears,and learned to swim and not fear the water. However ,the climax is also shocking for the readers because the author had shown Edna’s character as a strong women who had faced her fears and learned how to swim. By Edna killing herself the author shows us that Edna never changed and she is still that weak broken women who is trapped in life that she was so desperate to get out