Edna Pontellier's Role In The Awakening

The Awakening is a prime example of how a novel affects a reader’s inner thoughts on what is right or wrong. Most reprehensible to the public, is the idea that a mother could so casually abandon her children. In The Awakening, Edna Pontellier is a socially oppressed character that does what she feels is necessary to escape her matronly role. Although the late nineteenth was still a restrictive time for women, there were movements towards "True Woman." The Victorian woman’s responsibility was to uphold traditional values and keep the home and family standards, and “True Woman” attempted to free women of these chains of domesticity.

Choked by the values of the Victorian era, yet willing to give up everything-even her own life-for the freedom of that era, Edna epitomized “True Woman” in the late nineteenth century. Edna was individualistic, rebellious, and creative. Although Chopin appears to "punish" Edna by drowning her in the end of the novel, neither Edna nor Chopin demonstrates any

outward signs of remorse or shame at Edna's social deviance. Because of the portrayal of Edna as a non "mother-woman” motherhood and children often serve to emphasize a woman's self-deprivation. In The Awakening, Chopin shows readers figuratively Edna, the repressed woman who only feels deprivation, and Madame Adèle Ratignolle who is a model mother-woman. In The Awakening, Chopin describes Edna as compared to Madame Ratignolle. Chopin writes:
“In short, Madame Pontellier was not a mother-woman.

The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels. Many of them were delicious in the role; one of them was the embodiment of every womanly grace and charm. If her husband did not adore her, he was a brute, deserving of death by slow torture. Her name was Adèle Ratignolle” (Chopin 8). The mother women were to be respected, but also pitied, these were women who were trapped within their social rules. Some, like Madame Ratignolle, were content with the role of just being an adoring mother while others, like Edna Pontieller, wanted to shed the shroud of matronly duties and be free to do as she

pleased.