A Comparison of Kate Chopin's The Awakening and Grand Isle
Grand Isle is the movie adaptation of Kate Chopin's 1889 novel, The Awakening. Turner Network Television (TNT) made the movie in 1991, and it stars Kelly McGillis as Edna Pontellier and Adrian Pasdar as Robert Lebrun. To say that this movie is based, even loosely, on The Awakening is an insult to Kate Chopin's colorful literary work. A reviewer from People Weekly calls it a "tedious melodrama" and sees it as Kelly McGillis's "vanity project" because she is star, producer, and narrator ("Grand Isle" 13). Grand Isle is an example of how Hollywood's ratings scramble can tear apart a striking piece of literature.
This movie misses the novel's subtle commentary on society completely. The first example is the role of Leonce Pontellier. In the movie, he is portrayed as a hateful, negligent husband. It is a temptation to make an easy villain of Leonce in the novel, but he is simply a male chauvinist, which was not an uncommon role in his society (Skaggs 88). Chopin was trying to address society as a whole, while the movie turns Leonce into the bully. Only the scenes where Leonce is angry with Edna are shown, leaving out his confusion and concern for her. The movie shows Leonce scolding Edna for neglecting the children, demanding her to come inside instead of sleep in the hammock, and becoming angry with her when he finds she has skipped her reception day. It does not show his genuine concern for her which he confides to his doctor or his confusion over her behavior. By creating a villain in Leonce, the movie misses the point Chopin was trying to address about her society in general.
Another aspect of the movie that falls short of Chopin's novel is the relatio...
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...dunes, and sunsets do not make up for the movie, but they help reduce the feeling that watching this movie was the biggest waste of time in the viewer's whole life. The People reviewer says, "Watch it with the sound off." ("Grand Isle" 13)
Any time a literary work is turned into a movie, the producers have a difficult task to make the movie as good as the novel. Grand Isle's producers, Turner Pictures and Kelly McGillis, failed miserably. Their dominant error was that they missed everything Kate Chopin was trying to say about her society and human nature in the novel. They twisted the story into a story of an affair, as opposed to a story of one woman's self-discovering journey.
Works Cited
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York: Bantam, 1889.
"Grand Isle," People Weekly 13 Jul. 1992.
Skaggs, Peggy. Kate Chopin. Boston: Twayne, 1985.
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...
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In the novella The Awakening by Kate Chopin, the main character Edna Pontellier “becomes profoundly alienated from traditional roles required by family, country, church, or other social institutions and is unable to reconcile the desire for connection with others with the need for self-expression” (Bogard). The novella takes place in the South during the 1800’s when societal views and appearances meant everything. There were numerous rules and expectations that must be upheld by both men and women, and for independent, stubborn, and curious women such as Edna, this made life challenging. Edna expressed thoughts and goals far beyond her time that made her question her role in life and struggle to identify herself, which caused her to break societal conventions, damage her relationships, and ultimately lose everything.
Kate Chopin uses dynamic characters to help create Edna Pontillier. By using Mr. Pontillier, Edna’s children, and Madame Ratignolle to contrast Edna; and Robert, Madame Raisz, and Arobin as supporting characters to Edna’s untraditional ambitions Kate Chopin produces an independent, unconventional woman. While some characters contrast to Edna all of the characters in The Awakening help to illuminate Edna’s opposition to Creole tradition. Without the use of supporting and contrasting characters Edna would have never been able to fly above tradition.
Also, the rhetoric Chopin uses is full of contradictions from the beginning. not only that, but there are so many contradictions of manner, style, Point of view, and all of these both internal and external of each of the characters. For example, Leonce “Pontellier wore eye-glasses. He was a man of forty, of medium height and rather slender build; he stooped a little. His hair was brown and straight, parted on one side. His beard was neatly and closely trimmed,” whereas his sons are described “sturdy little fellows of four and five.” This suggests that he is rather delicate, and that his wife, after whom they presumably take (ils tiennent de leur mere) is sturdy and strong, and can and will take him at something. Another significant one comes in chapter xxix where her interior monologue talks of her “understanding [as]...that monster made up of beauty and brutality.”
society's assumptions about women and the morals that they value. Often, a character is set apart from their culture for this sole. purpose, to stress a point the author wants to make. In this case, the answer is yes. Chopin wants to show the reader how male dominated society has been.
Douglass's narrative is, on one surface, intended to show the barbarity and injustice of slavery. However, the underlying argument is that freedom is not simply attained through a physical escape from forced labor, but through a mental liberation from the attitude created by Southern slavery. The slaves of the South were psychologically oppressed by the slaveholders' disrespect for a slave’s family and for their education, as well as by the slaves' acceptance of their own subordination. Additionally, the slaveholders were trapped by a mentality that allowed them to justify behavior towards human beings that would normally not be acceptable. In this manner, both slaveholder and slave are corrupted by slavery.
The background of both authors, which was from the South, we can conclude how they could described the situations that they faced such as political and social presumptions problems especially for women at that time. The story explains how Chopin wrote how women were to be "seen but not heard". "The wife cannot plead in her own name, without the authority of her husband, even though she should be a public
...ree for his problems and treats her with disrespect. The issues and problems in Kate Chopin?s stories also connect with issues in today?s society. There still exist many men in this world who hold low opinions of women, are hypocritical in their thoughts, dealings, and actions with women, and treat honorable, respectable women poorly, just as Charles and Armand did in Chopin?s stories. Women in ?Desiree?s Baby? and ?A Point at Issue? strive for personal freedom and equality which equates to modern times in that some women are still paid less for doing the same job as men and in some countries, women still cannot vote. The relationship between men and women in Chopin?s stories still, in some effect, directly apply to today?s world.
All in all, Frederick Douglass’s book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, was a story of slavery and freedom. He was fortunate that he was able to experience a better slave life than others. He was able to obtain knowledge about reading that he was not obtaining to be a slave for all his life. He, unlike other slaves, knew he was not supposed to be a slave for the rest of his life. He described the ways by which slaveholders justify themselves for their actions. He was one of the rare ones who did not lose their way to freedom; he discussed the many ways that slaves were kept from thinking about escaping and freedom. Once he was free, he wrote this Narrative and refutes many myths that many have said about slaves and slaveholders.
Just because the men say women were not able to do the toughest of business did not mean women could not do the same things the men could do, they wanted to be equal too. Leonce says to Edna that she cannot do the same things as him for her being a woman. “You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier 's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose,” (Edna, pg. 102). Chopin’s The Awakening received mostly mixed reviews when it was first released, as people back then (mostly men) did not understand the feminist act. However, other people gave the novel good ratings understanding Edna’s actions to flee from reality, including the Chicago Times (now known as the Chicago Sun-Times), who praised the novel for its sexist traits. “That the book is strong and Miss Chopin has a keen knowledge for a writer of certain phases of feminine character will not be denied. But it was not necessary for a writer if so great refinement and poetic grace to enter the overworked field of sex fiction,” (Chicago Times-Herald, 1899). They also said while it was not a pleasant story for its depressing ending, they gave Kate Chopin thumbs up for making Edna a likable character with a believable personality and said that Chopin was the best character
The Awakening was shocking to readers in 1899, and would be today if it were published in “Ladies Home Journal”. Even today, women are expected to sacrifice themselves, if not to their husbands, then definitely to their children. I find it interesting that Grand Isle is the setting for the beginning and end of the novel. The story is built around a circle and represents the whirling force that is the energy of Edna’s life. The circle reminds me of Yeats’ “The Second Coming” : “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/things fall apart/the center cannot hold.”
In her novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley explores a wide range of themes concerning human nature through the thoughts and actions of two main characters and a host of others. Two themes are at the heart of the story, the most important being creation, but emphasis is also placed on alienation from society. These two themes are relevant even in today’s society as technology brings us ever closer to Frankenstein’s fictional achievement.
In America, the 1890s were a decade of tension and social change. A central theme in Kate Chopin’s fiction was the independence of women. In Louisiana, most women were their husband’s property. The codes of Napoleon were still governing the matrimonial contract. Since Louisiana was a Catholic state, divorce was rare and scandalous. In any case, Edna Pontellier of Chopin had no legal rights for divorce, even though Léonce undoubtedly did. When Chopin gave life to a hero that tested freedom’s limits, she touched a nerve of the politic body. However, not Edna’s love, nor her artistic inner world, sex, or friendship can reconcile her personal growth, her creativity, her own sense of self and her expectations. It is a very particular academic fashion that has had Edna transformed into some sort of a feminist heroine. If she could have seen that her awakening in fact was a passion for Edna herself, then perhaps her suicide would have been avoided. Everyone was forced to observe, including the cynics that only because a young