Love and Self in The Awakening
Kate Chopin's The Awakening is often said to triumph the exploration on the emotional and sexual needs of women, and the novel certainly is about that to a great extent, but even more importantly, it is a quest for individuality and the meaning of love. Through the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, Chopin describes in her novel one woman's journey towards self-consciousness. Several stages of 'awakenings' can be detected on the road, which are discussed in detail, along with the themes of romantic love, possession and an individual self. Darwinian theories are used to some extent to explore the nature of love and the meaning it had for Chopin.
According to Bert Bender, Kate Chopin was very interested in Darwin's theories of the descent of humans. In his article "The Teeth of Desire: The Awakening and The Descent of Man" he argues that Chopin studied Darwin closely and especially his theories of sexual selection. It first seemed to offer a liberating explanation for human behaviour, "sense of animal innocence in the realm of human courtship" (p. 460) in the strict atmosphere of Victorian etiquette and moral codes.
The principle of natural selection and the "survival of the fittest" is well known, and sexual selection is a specified form of that principle. It "depends on the success of certain individuals over others of the same sex in relation to the propagation of the species" (Darwin, p. 638). There are two kinds of sexual struggle which take place between the same sex. In the one individuals, generally of the male sex, try to drive away or kill their rivals in order to win a partner, the females remaining passive. In the other individuals, again generally mal...
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...ad her wings to fly. She broke her wing and fell "down, down to the water" (XXXIX, p. 587). Still, "it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life" (XXXVIII, p. 584).
Works Cited
Bender, Bert. "The Teeth of Desire: The Awakening and The Descent of Man" American Literature Vol. 63, No 3 (1991), 459-473.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. In Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 2. 2nd Ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1985.
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man; and Selection in Relation to Sex. 2nd Ed. New York: Prometheus Books, 1998
Franklin, Rosemary F. "The Awakening and the Failure of Psyche" American Literature Vol. 56, No. 4 (1984), 510-526
Showalter, Elaine. Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994
Kate Chopin’s The Awakening takes place in the late 19th century, in Grande Isle off the coast of Louisiana. The author writes about the main character, Edna Pontellier, to express her empowering quality of life. Edna is a working housewife,and yearns for social freedom. On a quest of self discovery, Edna meets Madame Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz, falls in and out of love,and eventually ends up taking her own life. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening shows how the main character Edna Pontellier has been trapped for so many years and has no freedom, yet Edna finally “awakens” after so long to her own power and her ability to be free.
Franklin, R. F. "The Awakening and the Failure of Psyche" American Literature 56 (Summer 1984): 510-526.
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...
Kate Chopin's The Awakening is a terrific read and I am hardly able to put it down! I am up to chapter XV and many of the characters are developing in very interesting ways. Edna is unfulfilled as a wife and mother even though she and her husband are financially well off. Her husband, Leonce Pontellier, is a good husband and father but he has only been paying attention to his own interests. At this point he is unaware of the fact that his wife's needs are not being met. Robert and the other characters are equally intriguing but something else has piqued my interest. Some of Chopin's characters are not fully developed. I know that these are important characters because they are representative of specific things; they are metaphoric characters. In particular, I've noticed the lovers and the lady in black. I'm fascinated by the fact that both the lovers and the lady in black are completely oblivious to the rest of the world. They are also in direct contrast with each another. For this week's reader response I am taking a different approach. Rather than analyzing the main characters, I will examine the lovers and the lady in black.
Sullivan, Barbara. "Introduction to The Awakening." In The Awakening, ed. Barbara Sullivan. New York: Signet, 1976.
Bogard, Carley Rees. “The Awakening: A Refusal to Compromise.” University of Michigan Papers in Women’s Studies 2.3 (1977): 15-31. Gale Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 January 2014.
13 Dec. 2004. Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996. Kreis, Steven.
The novel The Awakening is written by Kate Chopin in 1899 which shocked the readers with its honest treatment of female infidelity. Edna Pontellier is a married woman that is trapped in a stifling marriage. She then seeks to find the love and freedom that she desires with Robert Lebrun and Alcee Arobin. She broke her role of an ideal “mother woman” in her society and discover her true identity as being independent and passionate about what she desires.
Darwin's General Summary and Conclusions of the Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex In the "General Summary and Conclusions" of The Descent of Man, and
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