In Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, the works represent the unyielding social standards pressurized onto women and how they negatively affect the female protagonists. It is also shown how the women are able to triumph over the social standards and reach towards a life of greater satisfaction as individual women. While finding themselves, they also look for an outlet, an escape. The two women achieve the ultimate goal of absconding the pressures of society and domestic life by finding an escape route through abandonment, and death. Attempting to escape the conformist standards of society while trying to create an identity for oneself is a struggle faced in both Edna Pontellier’s and Nora Helmer’s lives. The two women find themselves to have very similar situations, an awakening of femininity, as well as a renaissance of independence, however; the two women handle the situation very differently. Nora and Edna both portray a grander pursuit for independence, and self-realization; both give the reader a possible outcome of which direction they may choose to take. Edna feels she has lost herself so inexplicably that there is merely no way out, while Nora has found herself and salvages her body and mind as her own. The women choose to conform to society’s expectations of women in the early twentieth century, however; Edna and Nora struggle with who they truly have become inside, until the conflict either consumes them or sets them free. Edna conforms by enduring her husband, Leonce Pontellier; caring for her children and home, and keeping her relationship with Robert discreet throughout the novel. While there is an obvious internal battle between romance, conformity, confusion, and unrealized raw passio... ... middle of paper ... ...alizes that not only can she accept herself, but no one else can, either, and her metamorphosis leaves her imprisoned. Nevertheless, both women realize that they have become something which only society expects of them, nothing that they have selected for themselves. They have become wives and mothers, instead of potentially single, and independent women, and their boxed-in world suffocates them. Their awakening is the product of a desperate thirst for oxygen. In both A Doll’s House and The Awakening, the eternal brawl for independence, entwined with the very first hints of femininity and acceptance of women as equals in a society where such a thing was deemed impossible. The two women find their escape routes in the only way they feel is the only way they can escape. Nora abandons her family to find herself, and Edna escapes by going into the ocean she arose from.
Throughout Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening, the main protagonist Edna Pontellier, ventures through a journey of self-discovery and reinvention. Mrs.Pontellier is a mother and wife who begins to crave more from life, than her assigned societal roles. She encounters two opposite versions of herself, that leads her to question who she is and who she aims to be. Mrs. Pontellier’s journey depicts the struggle of overcoming the scrutiny women face, when denying the ideals set for them to abide. Most importantly the end of the novel depicts Mrs.Pontellier as committing suicide, as a result of her ongoing internal
The Awakening is a novel about the growth of a woman becoming her own person; in spite of the expectations society has for her. The book follows Edna Pontellier as she struggles to find her identity. Edna knows that she cannot be happy filling the role that society has created for her. She did not believe that she could break from this pattern because of the pressures of society. As a result she ends up taking her own life. However, readers should not sympathize with her for taking her own life.
The Awakening sheds light on the desire among many women to be independent. Throughout the novel Edna conducts herself in a way that was disavowed by many and comes to the realization that her gender prevented her from pursuing what she believed would be an enjoyable life. As the story progresses Edna continues to trade her family obligations for her own personal pleasures. This behavior would not have been accepted and many even criticize the novel for even speaking about such activities. Kate Chopin essentially wrote about everything a women couldn’t do. Moreover, it also highlights the point that a man is able to do everything Edna did, but without the same
The exterior influences of society affect a woman’s autonomy, forcing her to conform to other’s expectations; however, once confident she creates her own
When Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" was published at the end of the 19th Century, many reviewers took issue with what they perceived to be the author's defiance of Victorian proprieties, but it is this very defiance with which has been responsible for the revival in the interest of the novel today. This factor is borne out by Chopin's own words throughout her Preface -- where she indicates that women were not recipients of equal treatment. (Chopin, Preface ) Edna takes her own life at the book's end, not because of remorse over having committed adultery but because she can no longer struggle against the social conventions which deny her fulfillment as a person and as a woman. Like Kate Chopin herself, Edna is an artist and a woman of sensitivity who believes that her identity as a woman involves more than being a wife and mother. It is this very type of independent thinking which was viewed as heretical in a society which sought to deny women any meaningful participation.
how quickly women succumb to their "roles", and how easily people can. be shaped to consider a different and all too meaningless set of morals. The sexy of the sexy. Edna is strategically alienated in the novella so as to be the
With a heart-full of advice and wisdom, Dinah maturates from a simple- minded young girl to a valiant independent individual. “For a moment I weighed the idea of keeping my secret and remaining a girl, the thought passes quickly. I could only be what I was. And that was a woman” (170). This act of puberty is not only her initiation into womanhood but the red tent as well. She is no longer just an observer of stories, she is one of them, part of their community now. On account of this event, Dinah’s sensuality begins to blossom and she is able to conceive the notion of true love.
The concept how woman are treated in modern times have changed drastically compared to woman who lived in the conservative period. That period was the time where the perception of individuals in general dealt with countless restraints. The women were the ones who were affected the most because these values had strongly influenced them. Woman behaved in a way how their husband’s wanted because they were living their lives by the controlled ways of the man. The story of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the story of “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin are two stories that show accurately the way how women were treated at that time; exactly Edna and the other women. I want to discuss that the main characters of these two stories; Edna and the other women’s liberty were interdicted by their husbands. Finally, the way how both stories end; Edna’s suicide, and the other women’s insanity; demonstrates their inability to escape from the unhappy reality. None of them found the real strength, to outdo the restriction and effects of society, to attain their independence and freedom that they continuously wanted to achieve.
Female companions are very important to the development of the main characters in Kate Chopin's The Awakening and in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House. Mademoiselle Reisz and Madame Ratignolle, in The Awakening, and Kristine Linde, in A Doll House, help Edna Pontellier and Nora Helmer discover their inner selves.
As the novel starts out Edna is a housewife to her husband, Mr. Pontellier, and is not necessarily unhappy or depressed but knows something is missing. Her husband does not treat her well. "...looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage." She is nothing but a piece of property to him; he has no true feelings for her and wants her for the sole purpose of withholding his reputation. "He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother's place to look after children, whose on earth was it?" Mr. Pontellier constantly brings her down for his own satisfaction not caring at all how if affects Edna.
Dinah is born into a society where all women are expected to put their feelings aside to conform to and satisfy the man and his children. She is trapped from the very beginning in a chauvinistic and male-dominated worl...
Critics of Kate Chopin's The Awakening tend to read the novel as the dramatization of a woman's struggle to achieve selfhood--a struggle doomed failure either because the patriarchal conventions of her society restrict freedom, or because the ideal of selfhood that she pursue is a masculine defined one that allows for none of the physical and undeniable claims which maternity makes upon women. Ultimately. in both views, Edna Pontellier ends her life because she cannot have it both ways: given her time, place, and notion of self, she cannot be a mother and have a self. (Simons)
Many women in modern society make life altering decisions on a daily basis. Women today have prestigious and powerful careers unlike in earlier eras. It is more common for women to be full time employees than homemakers. In 1879, when Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll's House, there was great controversy over the out come of the play. Nora’s walking out on her husband and children was appalling to many audiences centuries ago. Divorce was unspoken, and a very uncommon occurrence. As years go by, society’s opinions on family situations change. No longer do women have a “housewife” reputation to live by and there are all types of family situations. After many years of emotional neglect, and overwhelming control, Nora finds herself leaving her family. Today, it could be said that Nora’s decision is very rational and well overdue.
... presented A Doll’s House which follows with the feminist thought of that occasion. Due to social conformity, Nora can be portrayed as a radical feminist because she walks away from her own family as well as children in search of self-enhancement. Ibsen afterward describes Nora as a drastic feminist in order to help exemplify just how bad society’s restrictions on women were. A Doll’s House is an ideal instance of Ibsen’s book that show social conformity and corruption in society and the central character is rising alongside conformity. The book strengthens the reaction of the reader’s through the protagonist who’s is Nora, as well as her husband Torvald. Torvald handles Nora like an instrument rather than an individual to some extent. Finally, the role of the reliant character change when Ibsen shows Nora infringement from Torvald and society’s prospect of women.
A Doll House was a play written well ahead of its time. This play was written in a time when it was considered an outrage for a woman such as Nora not only to display a mind of her own, but also to leave her husband in order to obtain her freedom. This play relates to the Art Nouveau and Edwardian period because just as the furniture and clothing were considered decorative pieces, so were women. Women were expected only to tend to the husband's and children's needs. Women were not supposed to do anything without first consulting the husband and certainly never do anything without his prior knowledge and approval. Women were expected to be at home and always looking presentable for their husbands.