Edna Pontellier's Struggle For Awakening

1151 Words3 Pages

Edna’s Struggle for Awakening by Kate Chopin is a novel that explores the life of a married woman in Victorian Louisiana. Victorian women were expected to obey the traditional gender roles of wives and mothers. These expectations include obedience to their husbands, maintaining a lady-like appearance, and keeping a nice household. Edna Pontellier is not only a woman living in Victorian times but also married to an upper-class Creole man, whereas she was raised in Kentucky. Women in New Orleans in this time period placed themselves clearly in one culture and not the other, Creole or “American.” Edna experiences a dilemma as she acts in both cultures and finds the relationship between her freedoms and regulations conflicted. Through Edna's shifting …show more content…

She is complacent with her part in society and is obedient to her husband, Leonce. When Leonce requests she tend to their son, who he claims is “consuming,” Edna gets out of bed to check on her child even though she “was quite sure Raul had no fever”(5). At this point in the novel, Edna sees it as her responsibility and obligation to listen to her husband, even though he makes her incredibly unhappy. She settles for her circumstances because of the reality of the time. Mr. Pontellier buys her affections with gifts and money, causing “the ladies, selecting with dainty and discriminating fingers and a little greedily, [to] all declare that Mr. Pontellier was the best husband in the world. Mrs. Pontellier was forced to admit that she knew none …show more content…

Yet, she sews children's clothes with Adele in order to appear “amiable” and preserve a certain social station. This mindset in Edna shifts with her growing affection towards Robert Lebrun. Over the summer, Edna developed an extramarital infatuation with a younger man, Robert. But, at the end of the summer, he departs for Mexico, leaving her depressed. Before Robert’s leaving she had “all her life long been accustomed to harboring thoughts and emotions which never voiced themselves”(47). But, his departure causes her to realize that she does not want to be held back by society's expectations for her and wants to speak and act on her desires. This shift is amplified with her departure from Grand Isle back to New Orleans and is representative of the beginning of her attempt at awakening. When Edna and her family return to New Orleans at the summer's end, Edna begins to rebel against societal norms and finds herself conflicted between her traditional roles and her wants for freedom. Throughout her marriage, Edna has maintained a perfect appearance in society, as her husband expects her to. Edna has followed the same routine every week since she got married and has abided by her traditional feminine

Open Document