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Self-Reliance themes
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The Awakening
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin was a novel wrote in the 1800’s that demonstrates the theme independence. In the novel, Edna Pontellier seeks to discover herself by many obstacles. The novel Awakening Edna slowly begins to slowly awaken when she begins to discover her impulse for independence. Her decision on seeking independence, made her do whatever it is she wanted. In the following paragraph’s, I will discuss how Edna indulges in social norms as she seeks her independence.
In Kate Chopin, The Awakening Edna Ponteiller is a married women whose life is pretty simple. She has a big house, maids, money, Kids, husband, and friends but she begins to realize
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she wants more for herself. Edna’s family and friends take a trip to Grand Ilse were her discovery begins. Throughout the novel Edna becomes distant from her husband and begins a relationship with two men. Arobin, which she doesn’t care for and Robert that she deeply loves. As, Edna grows throughout the novel she decides to leave her husband and go on with her own Lanz 2 life.
After moving on into her own place and seeing whomever she likes, whenever she wants. She discovered she may be able to be with the one she loves. Realizing Robert, her love isn’t coming back. Edna sets off to swim in the sea. She swims so far out and becomes so exhausted she dies at sea.
Edna begins to experience many emotions that she doesn’t realize she is begging to feel her own independent ideas. This begins at her trip in Grand Ilse’s. Edna and Madame Ratignolle take a walk to the beach, as they sit and have a conversation amongst one another, Edna lays her head down on Madame’s lap. Madame Ratigonelle states “It’s muddled her like wine, or like a first breath of freedom” (Chopin, PG. 1267). Kate Chopin writes on page 1284 that Edna was seeing different eyes and making new dissuasions for herself. Which is a new beginning and began to change Edna’s environment, But Edna doesn’t suspect that she is gaining independence. Edna seems to begin to be resentful towards her husband. While, discovering her independence. One night Edna and her husband were having dinner when Mr. Pontellier ask Edna were she gone all day. Edna replies “Nothing. I simply felt like going out, and I Went out” (Chopin, Pg. 1293). Women in this time didn’t do this when leaving the house they better have a suitable explanation for
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their absence. Edna is beginning to realize her independence, as she begins talking back to her husband.
In Kate Chopin The Awakening, on page 1277, Mr. Pontellier demands Edna to go inside and sleep. Edna replies back she is not going inside and to never speak to her like that
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again. After Edna having an outburst with her husband “She began to do as she liked and feel as she liked” (Chopin, Pg. 1297).She stop going home for her every Tuesday dinner with Mr.Pontellier, stopped seeing visitors and didn’t attend to her normal house duties as a wife and mother. Edna is focusing on herself and what makes her an independent person. Edna realizes her Independence as “There were days when she was happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some southern day. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested” (Chopin, Pg.
1298). The Awakening demonstrates the theme independence. Edna goes through a journey of Independence. She faces many new challenges to discover who she is. Edna indulges in her own independence. Her dissuasion of doing as she pleases when she wants, whenever she want changed her whole life. These actions changed her as a person.
When her husband and children are gone, she moves out of the house and purses her own ambitions. She starts painting and feeling happier. “There were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day” (Chopin 69). Her sacrifice greatly contributed to her disobedient actions. Since she wanted to be free from a societal rule of a mother-woman that she never wanted to be in, she emphasizes her need for expression of her own passions. Her needs reflect the meaning of the work and other women too. The character of Edna conveys that women are also people who have dreams and desires they want to accomplish and not be pinned down by a stereotype.
Kate Chopin's The Awakening tells the story of Edna Pontellier, a young wife and mother living in the upper crust of New Orleans in the 1890s. It depicts her journey as her standing shifts from one of entrapment to one of empowerment. As the story begins, Edna is blessed with wealth and the pleasure of an affluent lifestyle. She is a woman of leisure, excepting only in social obligations. This endowment, however, is hindered greatly by her gender.
Essentially, Edna is not able to fulfill any of the roles that are presented by Chopin in the novel: mother, sister, daughter, wife, friend, artist, lover to either man, and finally the traditional role of a woman in society. She does not quite fit into any niche, and thus her suicide at the end of the novel is the only way for Edna’s story to end. Chopin must have Edna die, as she cannot survive in this restrained society in which she does not belong to. The idea of giving yourself completely to serve another, Edna declares “that she would never sacrifice herself for her children, or for any one” (47). However, her awakening is also a realization of her underprivileged position in a male dominated society. The first sign that Edna is becoming comfortable with herself, and beginning to loosen the constrictions of not being an individual is when she asks Robert, her husband, to retrieve her shawl: "When he returned with the shawl she took it and kept it in her hand. She did not put it around her" (30). Edna is trying to establish herself as an artist in a society where there is no tradition of women as creative beings. For any woman to suggest a desire for a role outside the domestic sphere, as more than a mother or housewife, was perceived as
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
Throughout Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Edna Pontellier, the main protagonist, experiences multiple awakenings—the process in which Edna becomes aware of her life and the constraints place on it—through her struggles with interior emotional issues regarding her true identity: the confines of marriage vs. her yearning for intense passion and true love. As Edna begins to experience these awakenings she becomes enlightened of who she truly and of what she wants. As a result, Edna breaks away from what society deems acceptable and becomes awakened to the flaws of the many rules and expected behavior that are considered norms of the time. One could argue that Kate Chopin’s purpose in writing about Edna’s inner struggles and enlightenment was to
In fact, Edna seems to drift from setting to setting in the novel, never really finding her true self - until the end of the novel. Chopin seems highly concerned with this question throughout her narrative. On a larger scale, the author seems to be probing even more deeply into the essence of the female experience: Do women in general have a place in the world, and is the life of a woman the cumbersome pursuit to find that very place? The Awakening struggles with this question, raising it to multiple levels of complexity. Edna finds liberation and happiness in various places throughout the novel, yet this is almost immediately countered by unhappiness and misery.
In Chopin's Awakening, the reader meets Edna Pontellier, a married woman who attempts to overcome her "fate", to avoid the stereotypical role of a woman in her era, and in doing so she reveals the surrounding. society's assumptions and moral values about women of Edna's time. Edna helps to reveal the assumptions of her society. The people surrounding her each day, particularly women, assume their roles as "housewives"; while the men are free to leave the house, go out at night, gamble, drink and work. Edna surprises her associates when she takes up painting, which represents a working job and independence for Edna.
Before then she was a spirited woman who was struggling against the traditional binary gender roles. Margaret and Edna parallel each other as they both exhibit masculine characteristics and do not fit in the mould of the 19th century. Edna is even described as a ‘’not a mother-woman’’ (19). She believes that she has no choice in her life. When Mademoiselle Reisz plays a piano piece, it stirs countless emotions inside of Edna. She imagines a man ‘’standing beside a desolate rock on the seashore. He was naked’’ (65). This is a symbol that Edna believes to be impossible for her. That symbol is of freedom. The man has shed all of his weight, his oppression and Edna wonders if this will ever be possible for her. As a woman, she might never be equal and will forever be oppressed and supressed. However, that very night, Edna stands up for herself and gains this awakening. Starting from this symbolic image that she imagines as she listens to the music, she starts to grow into the person she truly is. Chopin writes ‘’ a feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul’’ (70). Later that night she refused to go in with her husband, instead sleeping outside. She ‘’began to feel like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul’’. Edna was
In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Edna Pontellier’s suicide is an assertion of her independence and contributes to Chopin’s message that to be independent one must choose between personal desires and societal expectations. Chopin conveys this message through Edna’s reasons for committing suicide and how doing so leads her to total independence. 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 relationship as an individual to the world within and about her” (35).
As Kate Chopin’s The Awakening develops a woman’s journey to defy the present social oppression, this selected passage is Edna’s metamorphosis and the turning point in the novel. After listening to Mademoiselle Reisz’s music at Robert’s departure party, Edna swims for the first time and experiences her awakening to the desire for freedom. The surrounding ocean becomes a place that provides Edna strength to free herself and an isolated hiding where she can express her true essential self. However, Edna’s attempt for liberation eventually resigns to the overwhelming presence of death and the unfortunate realization about the society’s dominance. This passage from page 47-48 is the point of epiphany, establishing Edna’s transformation
Edna’s failed relationship with her husband Leonce highlights her tendency towards isolation and her breaking away from the security Leonce provides. During their vacation on Grand Isle, the couple has various disputes and Edna, in turn, begins to defy the wishes of her husband. She proclaims,“I mean to stay out here. I don’t wish to go in, and I don’t intend to. Don’t speak to me like that again; I shall not answer you”(Chopin 47). Edna’s deficiency of her husband’s intentions reflects her new perspective on life as well as growing theme that Edna prefers her isolation. Edna’s repetitive use of “I” reflects her intention to distinguish herself as individual apart from her marriage.The beneficiary
Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening expresses the difficulty of finding a woman’s place in society. Edna learns of new ideas such as freedom and independence while vacationing in Grand Isle. Faced with a choice to conform to society’s expectations or to obey personal desires for independence, Edna Pontellier realizes that either option will result in dissatisfaction. Thus, Edna’s awakening in Grand Isle leads to her suicide.
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.
Most marriages end in divorce. Indeed, the degree and level of suffering and pain throughout the populace is almost unfathomable. Perhaps, Ms. Chopin was living out a vicarious reality through Edna in committing suicide...and perhaps, this may be the underlying reason for the great reception which this novel has enjoyed...as well as staying power. Similarly, it has also been appointed a kind of jewel of the vanguard of women's rights. Indeed, "The Awakening" is one novel which exemplifies the attempt -- even realization -- of American womanhood's escape from personal and domestic bondage.
Social expectations of women affected Edna and other individuals in Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening. The protagonist, Edna Pontellier, struggles throughout the novel in order to become independent and avoid her roles as mother and housewife in American Victorian society in 1899. This was because women during the 19th century were limited by what society demanded of them, to be the ideal housewives who would take care of their families. However, Edna tries to overcome these obstacles by exploring other options, such as having secret relationships with Robert and Arobin. Although Edna seeks to be independent throughout the novel, in the end she has been awakened but has not achieved independence.