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The Awakening
“Edna began to feel like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities oppressing into her soul.” (Pg. 42) In Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening the constant boundaries and restrictions placed on Edna Pontellier by society will lead to her struggle for freedom and her ultimate suicide. Her husband Leonce Pontellier, the current women of society, and the Grand Isle make it evident that Edna is trapped in a patriarchal society.
There are constant boundaries and restrictions imposed on Edna Pontellier that ignite Edna’s struggle for freedom. Edna is a young Creole wife and mother in a high-class society. Leonce Pontellier, her husband is declared “…the best husband in the world”, while Edna sits and feels unsatisfied with her marriage. Edna did not respect her husband as the other women did. Leonce condemned Edna for neglecting their children. Edna’s mind was at rest concerning the present material needs of her children. Edna’s thoughts are clouded with her unhappiness, one night she awakes and sits in the night air and cries. She does not know how to explain her crying, but the reader is able to understand that it is because she is unhappy with her life.
Unlike many of the women that Edna is surrounded by she does not worship her husband. In a fit of rage one night she rips her wedding ring from her finger and throws it on the floor. She tries to stomp on it, but her small heel makes not indentation. Later, Edna feels like a child, but the action holds a lot of meaning. A wedding ring is meant to bind two people together through a promise, and Edna wants out of this promise. Determined to leave the life she doesn’t want, Edna leaves her family while they are away and rents a small house.
Edna lives with the knowledge that she is not a “woman-mother”. Her own husband chides her for not paying more attention to the children. Edna’s affections for her children depend on her mood, although she her state of mind always makes clear that she loves them. While talking to a close friend she attempts to explain how far she would go for the sake of her children, "I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself.
Madame Ratignolle simply does not understand Edna; to her, sacrificing one’s life is the utmost that a mother can do for her children. It is as if Edna was not even “talking the same language.” In fact, the two women might well be speaking different languages. Unlike Madame Ratignolle who seems to have a baby every couple of years, Edna’s head is not filled exclusively with thoughts about her children. Whereas Madame Ratignolle is motherly at all times, Edna often seems irritated by her role as mother, and her attentions to her children often occur as an afterthought. Madame Ratignolle’s entire being is bound to her children; Edna’s being is of her own design. For her there is more to life than marriage and babies and social obligations. Edna might well, at least in this passage, be asserting an early version of what Betty Friedan discusses in The Feminine Mystique.
...oroform, a sensation-deadening stupor, the ecstasy of pain, and an awakening—mark Edna’s self-discovery throughout The Awakening. Still, in the end, Edna follows through with what she told Madame Ratignolle she would and would not be willing to do: “I would give up my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself” (69). She gives up her life because she is unwilling to give up her self—her desires, her cravings, and her passions to do what she wants selfishly and without regard for any other being’s wishes. She cannot escape motherhood, nor can she ever hope to find her idealized lover. Thus, she leaves these dissatisfactions behind her as she enjoys her final moments of empowerment and solitude wrapped in the folds of the sea, the hum of bees, and the smell of pinks’ musk.
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.
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
She desperately wanted a voice and independence. Edna’s realization of her situation occurred progressively. It was a journey in which she slowly discovered what she was lacking emotionally. Edna’s first major disappointment in the novel was after her husband, Leonce Pontellier, lashed out at her and criticized her as a mother after she insisted her child was not sick. This sparked a realization in Edna that made here realize she was unhappy with her marriage. This was a triggering event in her self discovery. This event sparked a change in her behavior. She began disobeying her husband and she began interacting inappropriately with for a married woman. Edna increasingly flirted with Robert LeBrun and almost instantly became attracted to him. These feelings only grew with each interaction. Moreover, when it was revealed to Edna that Robert would be leaving for Mexico she was deeply hurt not only because he didn’t tell her, but she was also losing his company. Although Edna’s and Robert’s relationship may have only appeared as friendship to others, they both secretly desired a romantic relationship. Edna was not sure why she was feeling the way she was “She could only realize that she herself-her present self-was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored
The bourgeois crisis that Edna endures--the discrepancy between duty toward others and right toward herself[--] .
As the novel starts out Edna is a housewife to her husband, Mr. Pontellier, and is not necessarily unhappy or depressed but knows something is missing. Her husband does not treat her well. "...looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage." She is nothing but a piece of property to him; he has no true feelings for her and wants her for the sole purpose of withholding his reputation. "He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother's place to look after children, whose on earth was it?" Mr. Pontellier constantly brings her down for his own satisfaction not caring at all how if affects Edna.
Edna Pontellier could not have what she wanted. There are many arguments about Edna being selfish for ending her life and leaving her children behind. "Edna does indeed dread 'being reduced to her biological function, 'but this is what the Creole culture does to women , as Priscilla Leder suggests" (Simons). She could not offer the love that children deserve from a parent. I do not feel that she was selfish, she did not love her children the way a mother-woman would. A mother-woman is someone who puts her children before anything else in her life. Edna is not one of those "mother-women" who "esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels"; she is, rather a twenty-eight-year-old woman who hears 'the voice of the sea,' which seduces 'the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in inward contemplation'." (Toth)
The Awakening was a very exciting and motivating story. It contains some of the key motivational themes that launched the women’s movement. It was incredible to see how women were not only oppressed, but how they had become so accustomed to it, that they were nearly oblivious to the oppression. The one woman, Edna Pontellier, who dared to have her own feelings was looked upon as being mentally ill. The pressure was so great, that in the end, the only way that she felt she could be truly free was to take her own life. In this paper I am going to concentrate on the characters central in Edna’s life and her relationships with them.
By the beginning of the 18th century, there was an unmistakable feeling in the American Colonies that its intemperate society had become too comfortable and assertive, and had forgotten its original intentions of religious prosperity. The result was a revitalization of religious piety that swept through the American colonies between the 1730s and the 1770s, a movement known as "The Great Awakening". This revival was part of an evangelical upsurge occurring simultaneously in England, Scotland, Germany, and other inhabitants on the other side of the Atlantic. In all these Protestant cultures, a new Age of Faith had arisen contrasting the currents of the Age of Enlightenment, advocating the belief that being truly religious meant relying on biblical revelation rather than human reason.
Chopin carefully establishes that Edna does not neglect her children, but only her mother-woman image. Chopin illustrates the idea by telling the reader, "...Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman" (689). Edna tries to explain to Adele how she feels about her children and how she feels about herself, which greatly differs from the mother-woman image. She says, "I would give up the unessential; I would give my money; I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself. I can't make it more clear; it's only something I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me" (720).
people were becoming bored of the religion and it just became a past time for
Edna’s recognition of herself as an individual as opposed to a submissive housewife is controversial because it’s unorthodox. When she commits suicide, it’s because she cannot satisfy her desire to be an individual while society scorns her for not following the traditional expectations of women. Edna commits suicide because she has no other option. She wouldn’t be fulfilled by continuing to be a wife and a mother and returning to the lifestyle that she led before her self-discovery.
In The Awakening, Kate Chopin tells a story during the upbringing of the feminist movement, the movement was masked by the social attitudes entering into the 1900’s. She tells this story in the form of a novel, in which is told in a third person view, that is very sympathetic for Edna Pontellier, the protagonist. This is a review of the journey Edna takes in her awakening and evaluate the effectiveness this novel takes in introducing, continuing, and ending Edna’s awakening.
From all this chaos, Edna is consistently trying to find and express herself. She has a strong feeling towards being set free and the importance of herself to her. “I would give up the unessential; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn’t give myself. I can’t make it more clear; it’s only something which I am beginning to comprehend, which is revealing itself to me.” (47). What Edna is stating, is much deeper than a simple feeling on how she would not give herself away for her children. She’s expressing her emotions on the creativity of feministic thoughts and feels who you are as your own person is essential. Another example is, "You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say, 'Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,' I should laugh at you both." (108). This shows Edna again exploring feminist thoughts and the feeling that she is not an object. Kate Chopin shows many of the same feelings and readers see this through characters like Edna and other literary sources. As an article states, “Chopin herself stood naked in her exploration of female creativity