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The figures that, during the novel, have the greatest role in shaping Edna Pontellier's character, and therefore the figures from whom she must escape, are her husband and children. It is her role as wife and mother that is supposed to define her, as it did for much of recorded history. Women were thought to have very little value outside of the home, especially in the higher classes (when it was unnecessary for women to earn an income or engage in labor for any other reason). Thus, it was her interactions with and devotion to certain specified others that was supposed to define her. As she awakens to the reality of this construct, she reflects, "I would give up the unessential [for my children]; I would give my money, I would give my life for my children; but I wouldn't give myself (Chopin, Chapter 16). Once she realizes that she truly as an identity of her own, she is unwilling to have it subsumed by anyone else.
Edna's foil throughout the novel is the unflappable Madame Ratignolle, who embodies society's ideal conception of the female identity. She is fully engaged with her children and her husband, and even spends her summer knitting winter garments for her coming baby. Though she and Edna Pontellier are the best of friends, they are also complete opposites in this regard. The novel refrains from judging either woman on the...
Just so, though Madame Ratignolle appears a touch too subservient in her role as the caretaker of her family, it is clear that this role makes her immensely happy and does not mark any lack of fulfillment on her part. Edna sees her as a representative of "women who idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals," but the book ends up disputing such outright judgment with the well defined character of Madame Ratignolle (Chopin, Chapter 1).
Madame Ratignolle dies in the novel, as well; both women, on very different paths and with remarkably different senses of feminine identity, end up leaving the world and themselves behind. Chopin never explicitly determines which is the proper way of behaving for a woman -- in fact, The Awakening is far more about having the ability and the opportunity to choose an identity, whatever it may be. This si the essence of the feminist struggle, and the reason it must take so many different forms. Feminism is about individual independence for women, and forcing individuals to follow the same rules, even in a fight for liberation, could ever be truly liberating.
By realizing that she cannot share herself with anyone, Edna has to come to terms with her inability to maintain any true relationships; in this sense, she is destined to stand alone in the world (Ringe 586), a position which is suggested by the metaphor of the water. The final episode of the novel is represented by Edna's solitary swim into the emptiness of the Gulf. The metaphor of the
Awakening, which might have been more aptly titled, The Sexual Awakening shocked the delicate and rigid sensibilities of Kate Chopin's contemporaries of 1899, although many of those contemporaries were slowly experiencing awakenings of their own. In telling the story of a married woman who begins to realize that she is an individual human being, rather than a nonentity made up of female roles assigned by a male-dominated society, Chopin immediately
It is Edna who achieves both the awakening of the title, the awareness of how the social traditions imposed on her are stifling her and preventing her from expressing herself as she would wish, and also fails in that she cannot overcome these traditions and so chooses suicide rather than continue under such a repressive system. Chopin implies that there is a danger in awakening, in understanding the nature of
Awakening mother-women ( Adele Ratignolle) mother-Women ( Edna Back to Sleep: Edna's Fate Kate Chopin's The Awakening functions as a turn of the century tragedy regarding the domesticated lot of women in American society. Its protagonist, Edna Pontellier, is forced to forsake all of the wonder, delight, and sensations of life -- those that are intrinsically hers, anyway -- for an unyielding society in which her only virtue is that of
Awakening" and "A Doll's House" The plight of women in the nineteenth century becomes the focus of Kate Chopin's short story, "The Awakening" and Henrik Ibsen's play, "A Doll's House." Moments of self-realization are the predominant themes in these stories, which result in enlightenment coupled with tragedy. This paper will examine Nora and Edna and how their situations push them toward the path of self-discovery. Nora and Edna have much in
Men and Quality of Life in the Awakening The Awakening is a story of one woman's struggle for self-identity. People have often remarked that Chopin defined for her time what it meant to be a woman. Edna, the main protagonist in the Awakening, gives us a glimpse of the inner struggle of women of that time, and how they struggled for independence in a time that fought against such a right.