In the 19th century Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening shocked and outraged much of the Victorian literary public. With “True Woman” being the fashionable and iconic movement of the decade for a novel to backlash at “True Woman” was unspeakable to many readers. The main character Edna Pontellier throws away her social values to do what she wants, including having an illicit love affair. Of all the subtle foreshadowing and symbolism Chopin displays in this classic novel the sea plays a major role in Mrs. Pontellier’s so called “Awakening”. Edna from the very beginning of the novel faces overwhelming oppression from her husband and from her social bindings, and the sea lures her with its soothing voice, “There was no sound abroad except the …show more content…
hooting of an old owl in the top of a water-oak, and the everlasting voice of the sea, that was not uplifted at that soft hour. It broke like a mournful lullaby upon the night” (Chopin 6). To Edna the sea is almost like an illicit lover who sings her heartbroken lullabies almost calling her to join it in its own gloom. This is foreshadowing what Chopin has in store for Edna later on in the novel. “The sun was low in the west, and the breeze soft and languorous that came up from the south, charged with the seductive odor of the sea” (Chopin 12), once again the language Chopin uses to describe the sea is hypersexualized and symbolic of Edna’s relationship with Robert.
The “seductive odor”, like pheromones all biological creatures release, is pulling Edna to it once again, just like Edna is pulled to Robert. “Her glance wandered from his face away toward the Gulf, whose sonorous murmur reached her like a loving but imperative entreaty” (Chopin 12), Chopin uses the sea again symbolically to figuratively show readers how it calls to Edna and seduces her senses like Robert …show more content…
does. According to Tara Parmiter, in her paper “Taking the Waters: The Summer Place and Women’s Health in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening”, “After Edna’s midnight swim with Robert LeBrun, she sits with him in a silence “pregnant with the first-felt throbbings of desire” and later spends a few “feverish hours” trying to sleep while her mind and heart are racing with emotion. The Awakening is insistently sexual, explicitly involved with the body and with self-awareness through physical awareness” (n.p.), Chopin is clearly straining the foreshadowing of Edna having an affair with the “pregnant throbbings of desire” as Parmiter explains. “Swimming is a major component of Edna’s vacation at Grand Isle and greatly influences her well-being and sense of self. The midnight swim in particular, when she is “intoxicated with her newly conquered power,” shows Edna taking her first steps towards grasping her individuality. From that night forward, particularly after her beloved Robert leaves the island to travel to Mexico, Edna devotes herself to the ocean: “She spent much of her time in the water since she had acquired finally the art of swimming. As their stay at Grand Isle drew near its close, she felt that she could not give too much time to a diversion which afforded her the only real pleasurable moments that she knew”. The water is associated for Edna with her swim with Robert, with a sense of power and newfound independence, with solitude and sensuality. It helps her cool her “feverish” emotions and gives her an “art” to practice as an outlet for self-expression” (Parmiter n.p.). Parmiter makes an excellent point when she compares Robert to the ocean and how it sways Edna’s emotions back and forth like the waves on the shore. “The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace” (Chopin 13), Edna is tantalized by the sea’s whispers of sweet nothings in her ears, just like Robert’s sweet nothings in her ears the entire time she was at the Grand Isle with him. Manfred Malzahn who wrote, “The Strange Demise of Edna Pontellier”, explains how the sea only reflects what Edna was already thinking, “The voice of the sea is described as alluring, tantalizing, persistent utterance of a potentially dangerous natural force.
If Edna has herself acquired such a voice at last, is not the suggestion even stronger that it was something within her which spoke to her in the first place? As a parrot will only reflect such language as it has been taught, the sea will only tell the listener what he or she wants to hear, and the message is ultimately that from a human being” (n.p.). “The foamy wavelets curled up to her white feet, and coiled like serpents about her ankles” (Chopin 115), just like a snake wraps around its prey, Edna is once again drawn back to Grand Isle. Only this time Chopin is foreshadowing Edna’s watery
demise. Chopin’s use of the sea is immensely important to Edna Pontieller’s fate. From foreshadowing Edna’s passionate love affair to Edna’s symbolic watery death the sea plays its key role in seducing Edna and making her submit to its will, just as Robert broke Edna’s spirit by rejecting her in the end. Edna chose to listen and make her own demise by the sea because just as Robert killed her last shred of freedom Edna went back to the spawning ground of her freedom. The sea ends up being Edna’s tomb, for her freedom came from there and her freedom would die there, just as Chopin planned all along.
In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, the romantic and lyrical nature of Frederick Chopin’s Impromptu, as well as its originality, are the vehicle by means of which Edna realizes her love for Robert and her desire to be free and self-determined.
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.
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...
From a mother, wife, and society woman, Edna progresses to a unique woman of her own, free and independent. By deciding to choose her own paths to take in life, breaking the rules and expectations of the people around her, Edna achieves total control of her destiny. The backdrop of Edna's journey of her awakening is the tantalizing whisper of the ocean. The ocean awakens Edna's senses, teaches her the thrill of taking a risk and offers her inspiration to "dare and defy" (109).
In a more practical way, Chopin uses water to immediately and tangibly revive Edna. During a church service that Edna attends with Robert, she is overcome with "oppression and drowsiness" (60). She leaves the service and is comforted that the only sound is the "voice of the sea" (60). However, it is a water drawn by an Acadian youth that "greatly revived and refreshed her" (61). Additionally, when Edna is home by herself, she ends the evening with "a refreshing bath...and as she snuggled comfortably beneath the eiderdown a sense of restfulness invaded her, such as she had not known before" (122) These two small instances provides legitimacy and support to Chopin's affair with water in the novel.
“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” implies the tremendous joy that encourages her to shout, as well as underscores the significance of the experience in terms of the greater awakening, for the experience actually does provide Edna with the ability to control her own body and soul for the first time. Her “daring and reckless” behavior, her overestimation of strength, and the desire to “swim far out, where no woman had swum before” all suggest the tragic conclusion that awaits Edna. Whether her awakening leads her to want too much, or her desires are not fully compatible with the society in which she lives, she goes too far in her awakening. Amazed at the ease of her new power, she specifically does not join the other groups of people in the water, but rather goes off to swim alone. Indeed, her own awakening ultimately ends up being solitary, particularly in her refusals to join in social expectations. Here, the water presents her with space and solitude, with the “unlimited in which to lose herself.
She begins by becoming “passionately enamored of a dignified and sad-eyed cavalry officer;” then “her affections were deeply engaged by a young gentleman who visited a lady on a neighboring plantation;” and finally, “the face and figure of a great tragedian began to haunt her imagination and stir her senses” (39). All of these figures are unattainable and, therefore, leave her discontented, yet she feels desire for them and so she feels passion, which to her is better than numbness. Chopin indicates that she needs something exciting, something beyond the ordinary routine of life. Edna wants to be “passionately enamored,” and have her affections “deeply engaged.”
The book begins and ends with Edna and her attraction to the water. Throughout the story, water plays a symbolic part in the unfolding of Edna and her relationship to Robert and also her awakening to a new outlook on life along with an independence that takes her away from her family and the socially constraining life in which she no longer can see herself a part of. Edna and Robert are at the beach enjoying each others company. They quickly return to the cottage where Leonce is, and he talks to them. They have had a good time down by the water and Leonce, being the proper business man that he is, does not understand why Robert would rather spend his time chatting with his wife than attending to other things.
Another aspects of the story is that once Edna’s awakening begins to take place, she is on a roller coaster of emotions, from the manic exuberance of listening to music and the sounds of the water, her connection to robert--it’s as though all her senses are opened up. Between times, however, she is really depressed, as though all the color that Chopin imparts so beautifully in the descriptions of the other scenes, has become dull and uninteresting. Then, she is flung into an emotional upheaval when she reads Robert’s letter to Mlle Reisz, as the latter plays Wagner. Clearly, these kinds of emotions cannot be borne by a woman whose cultural structure does not admit the building of her own that it might sustain the weight and number. She is overwhelmed. She must escape, and she does, for her situation now is powerfully reminiscent of the “joy that kills” in “Hour.”
Throughout the story the ocean represented Edna's constant struggle for self-realization and independence. From her first flow of emotion on the beach to her last breath of life in the sea, the ocean beckons her. The voice of the sea lures her onward in her journey toward liberation and empowerment.
As Edna's fortified ego emerges ashore, her attachment to Robert is strengthened. The intimate moment they share at the end of the chapter bespeaks an "acme of bliss," where "no multitude of words could have been more significant than those moments of silence, or more pregnant with the first-felt throbbings of desire" (Chopin 63, 77).
Throughout her novel, The Awakening, Kate Chopin uses symbolism and imagery to portray the main character's emergence into a state of spiritual awareness. The image that appears the most throughout the novel is that of the sea. “Chopin uses the sea to symbolize freedom, freedom from others and freedom to be one's self” (Martin 58). The protagonist, Edna Pontellier, wants that freedom, and with images of the sea, Chopin shows Edna's awakening desire to be free and her ultimate achievement of that freedom.
Mademoiselle Reisz, Madame Ratignolle, and Kristine Linde all act as role models for the protagonists. Edna deeply admires Mademoiselle Reisz's piano playing. When Edna hears Mademoiselle Reisz's playing, "the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body" (Chopin 35). Mademoiselle Reisz makes Edna see the strong emotions inside herself. Edna admires Madame Ratignolle's "comforting and outgoing nature" (Solomon 118). At the beginning of the novel, Edna wishes she could have Madame Ratignolle's easygoing nature.
	At the end of this story, Edna kills herself by swimming out into the ocean. The movie shows just that, omitting two very significant symbols which are present in the novella. The first of these two symbols is the injured bird that’s "beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water." (Chopin, 124) This bird symbolizes Edna’s struggle to become the master her own life as well as her failure to achieve this goal. The other symbol is "the old terror [that] flamed up for an instant, then sank again." (Chopin 124) This is the same terror she feels when she swims out for the first t...
When Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" was published at the end of the 19th Century, many reviewers took issue with what they perceived to be the author's defiance of Victorian proprieties, but it is this very defiance with which has been responsible for the revival in the interest of the novel today. This factor is borne out by Chopin's own words throughout her Preface -- where she indicates that women were not recipients of equal treatment. (Chopin, Preface ) Edna takes her own life at the book's end, not because of remorse over having committed adultery but because she can no longer struggle against the social conventions which deny her fulfillment as a person and as a woman. Like Kate Chopin herself, Edna is an artist and a woman of sensitivity who believes that her identity as a woman involves more than being a wife and mother. It is this very type of independent thinking which was viewed as heretical in a society which sought to deny women any meaningful participation.