Similarities Between The Awakening And Forrest Gump

Traditional marriage has been an age old struggle for women. This topic can be found in different works that have been published or directed, two such instances of this struggle are illustrated in Kate Chopin’s story The Awakening and Robert Zemeckis’ film Forrest Gump. In Chopin’s The Awakening, the protagonist Edna struggles with her traditional marriage during a summer vacation. The attention of a younger man, Robert, helped Edna realize that she did not like her present situation of being a wife and mother of two children. Edna starts to break away from the norms of her society and tries to start living more freely and according to her own will. She would eventually leave her husband and begin to live on her own. The society at that time,

the late 1800’s, was not a place where a woman would behave in such a manner and there was some resistance from her friends.
In Zemeckis’ film adaptation of Forrest Gump one of the antagonists and the protagonist’s love interest, Jenny, goes through some of the similar struggles in her life, but in a different order. Jenny rejects marriage at the younger age and lives a free and wild life on her own. Eventually, she becomes a mother and embraces motherhood. Jenny would even marry Forrest, however it will be at a point where she is already dying and would not be able to enjoy her marriage. The characters, Edna in The Awakening and Jenny in Forrest Gump, each struggle with their own independence and commitment to marriage with different results as demonstrated by character, symbolism, and conflict.
Each of these characters started off life in a similar way. Neither one of them had a mother nor did they have a father that was always present. Ultimately, they we raised by a different relative other than a parent, Edna by her sister and Jenny by her grandmother. Neither of these two characters never really saw what a relationship should look like. The use of broken relationships in the younger years could be seen as foreshadowing of the issues these characters would have with relationships later in life. Upon completion of their adolescent years is where the two characters are seen to live differently. In normal fashion for the day and age, Edna is married to Leonce and then has two children. Edna’s marriage was not for true love, but she married because her father did not approve of Leonce. Edna is not portrayed as having an active part in parenting and as an example of her non-participant parent role, she sends her children to stay with her in-laws while her husband is out of town. She realizes that she is not happy with her marriage and the direction in which her life is going.
Zemeckis depicts Jenny as a hippie during the 1960’s; taking drugs, attending protests, living wild and free.

She has several relationships, but they do not work out. She later becomes a mother to Forrest’s baby and eventually marries Forrest. Jenny came around to the idea of marriage after living a life that was free from responsibility and realizing the emptiness of her other relationships, whereas Edna was married and felt empty, then later sought the freedom to become her own women. Each story shows the struggles these characters went through and used similar symbolism to emphasize the points they were trying to

make.
In each story birds are used as a symbol to represent these two women. Birds are often used as a sign of freedom, each bird referenced has a very distinct meaning. In The Awakening birds are used in the beginning of the story. There is a caged parrot symbolizing Edna trapped in her marriage and not having her own identity but pretending to be something she is not. She later moves into the “pigeon house” after she leaves Leonce, it is a small place that that she could come and go as she pleases just like a pigeon might come and go from a rooftop pigeon house. At one point in the story when Edna visits Mademoiselle Reisz, Mademoiselle tells her: “It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth” (Chopin 63). At the end of the story when Edna is at the beach, she sees “A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water” (Chopin 86). Chopin is showing how Edna is like the bird with the broken wing and is not able to soar to freedom.
In the beginning of Forrest Gump, Jenny and Forrest are seen running into a field to get away from her father and she prays to “…become a bird so she could fly away” (Forrest Gump). After she prays doves are seen flying out of the field and into the sky. The dove can be a sign of purity and innocence which seems to have left Jenny that day. Later in the story, Jenny is seen standing on the railing of a porch high above the city obviously high on drugs. The southern rock band, Lynard Skynard, whose famous song “Freebird” is playing the background as she almost slips and falls. Contrary to the lyrics of the song, Jenny is anything but free. She is trapped in the life of drugs and failed relationships. Jenny realizes she is messed up, both physically and mentally, and leaves to go find Forrest. This would be Jenny’s “awakening” of the failures in her life due to her bad choices. The final use of birds in Forrest Gump is near the end of the story, after Jenny dies, Forrest is seen standing over her grave and a group doves land in the tree above her grave. These doves could represent the peace that she now has. This use of birds adds to further illustrate the difficult situations the characters find themselves in.
Chopin shows how the conflict within Edna is a result of her marriage.

Edna marrying Leonce is a result of her rebelling against her father. He did want not her to marry Leonce, but she marries him anyway. This was the beginning of her downfall because she did not truly love Leonce. While on vacation at Grand Isle Edna spent a fair amount of time with Robert, the innkeeper’s son. He was known to direct his attention to a different woman each summer, and this summer Edna was the object of his attention. This was a normal practice for Robert, but no one really took him seriously. The problem was that Edna was not the typical wife and become fond of Robert. Although Leonce did care for Edna, she is referred to as being part of his property. “Yet Chopin does hint that late-nineteenth-century marriages cast women as the objects of others rather than as the free subjects of their own fates” (Fox 120). Edna realize that she no longer wanted to be like the other wives and decided to leave Leonce. The problem with leaving her husband was that in the late 1800’s a woman would not leave her husband and live on her own, she would be expected to stay

married.
Jenny had relationship issues very early in life beginning with an abusive father. She grew up in the 60’s and lived like a hippie. She is shown to have several boyfriends, one who actually hits her. She is also seen leaving a boyfriend that is passed out, probably from drugs, right after the scene where she almost slips off the railing. Jenny even leaves Forrest behind several times throughout the story, she kept him in the friend zone. The series of failed relationships makes her realize that Forrest will be there for her despite all she has been through. Sue Walker sums up Jenny’s life in the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture: “she lives a short, unhappy life that serves as questionable testimony to the overriding power of love”. Jenny’s actions were not that out of the norm for that period and eventually she did settle down and marry Forrest. This was rather significant considering it seemed to be everything she was against earlier in her life.
These two characters had difficulties with relationships beginning from when they were young girls. One chose marriage for the wrong reasons and lives a miserable and difficult life while desiring liberation from her situation. The other lives free and realizes the difficulties that come with that life and eventually chooses marriage. Each character winds up dying young because of the choices they have made and even though these characters lived in different times, they each faced many challenges in their relationships and marriages.