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The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, is about a Creole woman named Edna Pontellier living in late 1800s New Orleans and Grand Isle. In the beginning of the novel it is learned that Edna is married to Leonce Pontellier, a man she does not love. Edna feels trapped by her marriage and the constraints of the society around her. While spending the summer with her friends and family on Grand Isle Edna meets a man named Robert. Through constantly spending time with Robert she grows close to him and realizes her infatuation and love with him and the type of life she they could live together. As summer becomes fall Robert decides to leave for Mexico without telling Edna, because of this change she grows distressed and distracted forgetting her duties as a mother-woman and head of a household. However, Edna soon realizes the freedoms she now has and abandons all …show more content…
Chopin illustrates Edna’s continuous awakening as she learns that she cannot achieve true happiness and freedom living her current life Edna’s dissatisfaction of her life is displayed by Chopin when she begins to feel confined and trapped. As Robert and Edna grow closer she discovers her misery with the life fated for her. In the beginning of the novel Edna meets Robert at Grand Isle and they start to spend more time together. Edna enjoys her time with Robert and is soon clear that Robert does too as they often expressed “…occasional words, glances or smiles which indicated a certain advanced stage of intimacy and camaraderie…” (). Edna realizes the difference Robert makes in her life and eventually falls in love with him when he moved to Mexico at a moment’s notice. As a Creole woman Edna finds
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.
In chapter VI, we see most of the main ideas of the novel mentioned as the beginning of Edna’s awakening is described. The author expresses how Edna is unique in her desire to explore such concepts as fulfillment, self discovery, and independence. As the story continues we see Edna’s need for these things grow, and as new characters are introduced we see how different Edna is becoming from the rest of society. This is just the authors first mention of Edna’s growing awareness, but the passage also foreshadows the turmoil that will come from it later on in the novel. It suggests Edna’s inevitable mark of death, placed on her from the start of her awakening. Overall, this passage gives the reader a starting point to look back to when reviewing Edna’s character growth and the events that lead to her suicide.
In Chopin’s The Awakening two opposing viewpoints tend to surface regarding the main character, Edna’s, suicide. Was it an artistic statement or did Edna’s selfish and childlike character lead to her demise. These two perspectives consistently battle one another, both providing sufficient evidence. However, Chopin intentionally wrote two equally supported interpretations of the character in order to leave the book without closure.
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.
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.”
Unlike María Eugenia, Edna in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening chooses not to fill her family’s expectations. As she takes her final steps into the sea she thinks to herself: “they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul” (655). Edna treasures her autonomy and chooses death over familial subjugation. However her transformational journey, alluded to by the title of the novel leads to more than the rejection of her self-sacrificing familial roles as wife and mother and her death.
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.
Essentially, Edna is not able to fulfill any of the roles that are presented by Chopin in the novel: mother, sister, daughter, wife, friend, artist, lover to either man, and finally the traditional role of a woman in society. She does not quite fit into any niche, and thus her suicide at the end of the novel is the only way for Edna’s story to end. Chopin must have Edna die, as she cannot survive in this restrained society in which she does not belong to. The idea of giving yourself completely to serve another, Edna declares “that she would never sacrifice herself for her children, or for any one” (47). However, her awakening is also a realization of her underprivileged position in a male dominated society. The first sign that Edna is becoming comfortable with herself, and beginning to loosen the constrictions of not being an individual is when she asks Robert, her husband, to retrieve her shawl: "When he returned with the shawl she took it and kept it in her hand. She did not put it around her" (30). Edna is trying to establish herself as an artist in a society where there is no tradition of women as creative beings. For any woman to suggest a desire for a role outside the domestic sphere, as more than a mother or housewife, was perceived as
Throughout Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Edna Pontellier, the main protagonist, experiences multiple awakenings—the process in which Edna becomes aware of her life and the constraints place on it—through her struggles with interior emotional issues regarding her true identity: the confines of marriage vs. her yearning for intense passion and true love. As Edna begins to experience these awakenings she becomes enlightened of who she truly and of what she wants. As a result, Edna breaks away from what society deems acceptable and becomes awakened to the flaws of the many rules and expected behavior that are considered norms of the time. One could argue that Kate Chopin’s purpose in writing about Edna’s inner struggles and enlightenment was to
The Awakening was written by Kate Chopin, and published in 1899. The story takes place in the 1800s in Grand Isle New Orleans.
In The Awakening by Kate Chopin, the setting is in the late 1800s on Grand Isle in Louisiana. The main character of the story is Edna Pontellier who is not a Creole. Other important characters are Adele Ratignolle, Mr. Ratgnolle, Robert Lebrun, and Leonce Pontellier who are all Creole's. In the Creole society the men are dominant. Seldom do the Creole's accept outsiders to their social circle, and women are expected to provide well-kept homes and have many children. Edna and Adele are friends who are very different because of their the way they were brought up and they way they treat their husbands. Adele is a loyal wife who always obeys her husband's commands. Edna is a woman who strays from her husband and does not obey her husband's commands. Kate Chopin uses Adele to emphasize the differences between her and Edna.
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.”
In fact, Edna seems to drift from setting to setting in the novel, never really finding her true self - until the end of the novel. Chopin seems highly concerned with this question throughout her narrative. On a larger scale, the author seems to be probing even more deeply into the essence of the female experience: Do women in general have a place in the world, and is the life of a woman the cumbersome pursuit to find that very place? The Awakening struggles with this question, raising it to multiple levels of complexity. Edna finds liberation and happiness in various places throughout the novel, yet this is almost immediately countered by unhappiness and misery.
The Awakening by Kate Chopin ends with the death of the main character, Edna Pontellier. Stripping off her clothes, she swims out to sea until her arms can no longer support her, and she drowns. It was not necessarily a suicide, neither was it necessarily the best option for escaping her problems.
In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Edna Pontellier’s suicide is an assertion of her independence and contributes to Chopin’s message that to be independent one must choose between personal desires and societal expectations. Chopin conveys this message through Edna’s reasons for committing suicide and how doing so leads her to total independence. Unlike the other women of Victorian society, Edna is unwilling to suppress her personal identity and desires for the benefit of her family. She begins “to realize her position in the universe as a human being and to recognize her relationship as an individual to the world within and about her” (35).