The Awakenings Symbolic Significance Of The Sea

In the novel, “The Awakening,” Kate Chopin tells the story of a young married woman,

Edna Pontellier, who, while enjoying her summer holidays at a cottage on a beach with her family, meets a young man by the name of Robert Lebrun. Edna, who is not really in love with her husband, begins to have mixed feelings and, as a result, begins to realize who she truly is.

Edna feels that something is lacking in her life. The author uses the ocean to personify and symbolize what is missing in Edna’s life--the love of a man and freedom of the soul.

On several occasions Chopin uses the sea as a personification of Edna’s longing for the love of a man. Although Edna is married, she does not have the feelings for her husband which coincide with being in love. In one example, Chopin describes the sea: “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 contemplation” (13). The sea calls to Edna:

“The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft , close embrace” (13). Chopin is describing the sea as though it was a man with whom

Edna is in love and for whom she feels a strong attraction, not just someone she can make love to but someone she can loose herself in. Later, the young man, Robert Lebrun, who is stirring up all these feelings in Edna, asks her if she is going swimming; she answers him no and tells him she is too tired. Chopin describes Edna’s actions afterwards: “Her glance wandered from his face away toward the Gulf, whose sonorous murmur reached her like a loving but imperative entreaty” (12). Chopin is projecting Edna’s feelings for Robert, whether Edna is conscious of these feelings or not, onto the sea because a part of Edna does want to go swimming with him.

Edna also has a strong need for freedom and Chopin, with respect to Edna’s character, makes reference to the sea to express this need. On one occasion, Edna and Madame Ratignolle, her neighbour for the summer, are sunbathing on the beach. Madame asks Edna to where her mind is wandering. Edna tells her the ocean is bringing back a memory of a field in Kentucky which, as a child, she had run through with arms stretched out in the breeze as though swimming