Who Is Edna's Struggle For Freedom In The Awakening

When The Awakening opens, the reader meets Edna Pontellier. Edna is a wife and mother who is on a family vacation at Grand Isle. While vacationing, Edna becomes interested in a young man who goes by the name of Robert Lebrun. Robert and Edna then become close, but too close in Robert’s eyes. Robert realizes how fast the relationship between the two of them is moving, so he decides to flee to Mexico. Edna, who craves someone’s attention, becomes lonely without someone holding her hand. Just after she returns home to New Orleans, she acquires the love of another man: Alcee Arobin. She does not necessarily love Alcee, but he is the only one who will satisfy her needs, whether her needs are personal or sexual. By the time Robert returns, Edna has furthered her interest in painting and moved into a new house. When all is said and done, Edna realizes that everything is becoming too stressful, so she swims far out into the sea where she supposedly commits suicide. Critics have claimed that “the effect of this book was immediate and lasting” (Koloski 1). The reason for Chopin’s writing of this novel? Nobody really knows.

Edna Pontellier tries throughout the novel to gain freedom from her duties as wife and mother.

The “awakening” she experiences is simply a rebirth of what used to be her true self. Marriage is obviously a barrier in the novel from beginning to end. Edna starts out obeying her husband’s every need, but as the novel progresses, she finally gains confidence and begins to disobey him and make her own decisions. Kate Chopin uses The Awakening to “set off a firestorm of complaints from critics scandalized by its frank treatment of a woman’s frustration with her marriage, her emotional and sexual awakening and her eventual suicide” (3-4) to show how the character Edna is the backbone of this

novel.
Marriage is obviously a huge barrier in this novel not only to happiness, but to individual freedom. In the beginning of the novel, Edna is like her husband’s puppy dog. He is the master, he tells her what to do, she listens and obeys. As the novel progresses, Edna realizes that she is wasting her time doing that so she starts making and following her own rules. Léonce becomes very angry with his wife when she pays no attention to him, “He thought it very discouraging that his wife, who was the sole subject of his existence, evinced so little interest in things which concerned him, and valued so little his conversation” (Chopin 5). If he does not care for Edna’s stories/conversations, why should she care for his? Léonce does not seem to notice that Edna is more than a piece of jewelry or fine China.
Edna’s independence is really just a feeling that differentiates between her two personalities: one personality obeys her husband’s every need, while the other personality does not care what he wants. This break through happens because “even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life - that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions” (13). Her first “break through” is shown when she learns to swim. Her next pursuit towards individualism is noticeable when she takes up painting as a hobby. When Edna finally gains confidence over her feelings, something stops her in her tracks - her husband. After she makes the final decision to leave her husband and children, she finds out the hard way that the grass is not always greener on the other side. Upon leaving her husband, she figures out that Robert is not truly and genuinely in love with her.
Even though her “awakening” was filled with lots of bad moments, Edna is able to learn some new things. First, she learns that it is okay to openly speak about how you feel. Edna is taken by surprise when she sees how these women act, yet she begins to take a liking to their method. Fortunately for Edna, she learns to express herself through art and she takes up the hobby of painting. With Edna’s fleeing husband, she has never really gotten to experience what it is like to love someone or to be loved. Due to her past with Robert and Alcee, Edna learns to express the love and compassion that has been bottled up for so long.