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kate chopin's view on feminism
Kinnison, Dana. “Female Resistance to Gender Conformity in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.”
kate chopin the awakening feminism
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In Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening, her protagonist, Edna Pontellier, a displaced woman of the 19th century lives a life influenced by the men in her society. Edna, a stranger in her own home, has a difficult time accepting traditional roles in society and her role as a mother. People of society in 19th century America, especially in the New Orleans, stigmatized women who felt the need to leave the home and disregard their duties as unacceptable ladies. Evidently Edna is looked down upon for her erratic behavior. In order to be accepted in her community Edna feels the need to live a life she is not content with. However, she soon realizes that she will not allow herself to deviate from her passion in order to satisfy people other than herself. This awareness comes from her interactions with the men around her, for they each teach her something about herself. They unearth her utter dissatisfaction with the restrictions placed on her by society and even her growing sexual awareness. Men, from the likes of her father to her lover, each play a pivotal part in Edna’s awakening.
Childhood experiences, whether negative or positive, tend to have a long lasting effect on people for those experiences modify their perception in life. As a child, Edna’s mother passes away leaving her with only her father the Colonel, as a parental figure and her sister to care for her. The Colonel, a devoted Protestant, has strict traditional views of women and how men should treat them. During her youth, Edna learns that she is not committed to the church as much as her father prefers her to be. During a conversation with Madame Ratignolle Edna confesses, “Likely as not it was Sunday and I was running away from prayers, from the Presbyterian service, re...
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...’t plan on living, feels the need to be rescued. She develops relationships with men who she believes can save her from the restriction society and her marriage has placed on her only to realize that they cannot help her, she must rescue herself. In order for her to come to that realization Edna must first make the mistake of feeling like a helpless victim. Her path is composed lessons, lessons that she learns from her interactions with Robert, Alcee, and even Doctor Mandelet. The men in her life provoke her, each in their own way, to take action into her own hands and free herself for no one will ever truly understand. “Perhaps Doctor Mandelet would have understood if she had seen him – but it was too late; the shore was far behind her, and her strength was gone.” (Chopin, 139)
Works Cited
Walker, Nancy. Kate Chopin ; the Awakening. Boston: Bedford, 2000. Print.
In The Awakening, Edna is constrained culturally by the gender roles of 1890’s New Orleans, and throughout the book, she makes advances towards becoming free of these gender roles, and consequently, her constraints. Chopin writes, “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” (Chopin 18). The excerpt above is a direct example of Edna’s dual life. The duality of Edna’s life is extremely constraining because the gender roles of being a woman in southern society in 1890 force her into submission: she has to carry herself a certain way on the outside, or risk being excluded from “polite society”. Edna is aware of this, and in result, her inner personality is much more stifled in relative to her outward personality. Throughout the book, the way people view her changes greatly, as her deviant inward personality starts to triumph over
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.
Edna begins to question her role as mother. Edna's husband scolds her for her insensitivity to her children. Although Edna is fond of her children she, unlike the other women on Gra...
Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” is wrought with symbolism, foreshadowing and careful diction choices. Many of the passages throughout the novel embody Edna’s awakening sense of self-reliance, independence and sexuality. These are sy...
...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.
Throughout The Awakening, Edna faces oppression from her husband, children, and society. It is her duty, as a women, to get married and have children with her husband. Edna’s
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
For many centuries, literature has been used to communicated various ideas and wisdom gained from experiences. The idea of masculinity and male superiority can be best portrayed in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. The novel takes place at a luxurious resort known as the Grand Isle, located in New Orleans, during the mid-1800s. Edna Pontellier, one of the main characters in the novel, struggles to find happiness, love, and freedom. Her attitude towards many aspects of life are much different than other married women around her. This novel is very unique mainly because of the time period it was written in. During this era, strict gender roles were enforced and women had many restrictions. The duties of women were strictly fixated on cooking, cleaning, and nurturing. Edna Pontellier craved for independence. She became depressed due to the monotonous and cookie cutter society that she was forced to conform in. The plot of the novel focuses on Edna’s journey to progress into an independent women in this male driven soc...
Before then she was a spirited woman who was struggling against the traditional binary gender roles. Margaret and Edna parallel each other as they both exhibit masculine characteristics and do not fit in the mould of the 19th century. Edna is even described as a ‘’not a mother-woman’’ (19). She believes that she has no choice in her life. When Mademoiselle Reisz plays a piano piece, it stirs countless emotions inside of Edna. She imagines a man ‘’standing beside a desolate rock on the seashore. He was naked’’ (65). This is a symbol that Edna believes to be impossible for her. That symbol is of freedom. The man has shed all of his weight, his oppression and Edna wonders if this will ever be possible for her. As a woman, she might never be equal and will forever be oppressed and supressed. However, that very night, Edna stands up for herself and gains this awakening. Starting from this symbolic image that she imagines as she listens to the music, she starts to grow into the person she truly is. Chopin writes ‘’ a feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and her soul’’ (70). Later that night she refused to go in with her husband, instead sleeping outside. She ‘’began to feel like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing into her soul’’. Edna was
Society of the 19th century gave a heightened meaning to what it meant to be a women. According to the commonly known “code of true womanhood” women are supposed to be docile, domestic creations whose main concerns in life were to be raising children and submissiveness to their husbands. In the book The Awakening written by Kate Chopin; introduces the protagonist, Edna Pontellier a rebellious twenty-eight year old woman who is dissatisfied with the role of being a wife and mother, a woman who desires independence and sexual freedom. She soon discovers she doesn’t quite fit into the role that has been given to her. Through the use of symbolism, imagery, and irony. Chopin exposes expectations for women in order to be accepted during the Victorian
One example of how Edna¡¦s immaturity allows her to mature is when she starts to cry when LeƒVonce, her husband, says she is not a good mother. ¡§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?¡¨(13). Edna, instead of telling her husband that she had taken care of her children, began to cry like a baby after her husband reprimanded her. ¡§Mrs. Pontellier was by that time thoroughly awake. She began to cry a little¡Kshe thrust her face, steaming and wet, into the bend of her arm, and she went on crying there, not caring any longer to dry her face, her eyes, her arms,¡¨(13,14). These tears made Edna look as if she was still a child and that she is tired of being treated as a child by her husband. These tears also showed her she did not like where she was, a sign of maturity. Her tears symbolize her first awakening.
In the novella The Awakening by Kate Chopin, the main character Edna Pontellier “becomes profoundly alienated from traditional roles required by family, country, church, or other social institutions and is unable to reconcile the desire for connection with others with the need for self-expression” (Bogard). The novella takes place in the South during the 1800’s when societal views and appearances meant everything. There were numerous rules and expectations that must be upheld by both men and women, and for independent, stubborn, and curious women such as Edna, this made life challenging. Edna expressed thoughts and goals far beyond her time that made her question her role in life and struggle to identify herself, which caused her to break societal conventions, damage her relationships, and ultimately lose everything.
When Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" was published at the end of the 19th Century, many reviewers took issue with what they perceived to be the author's defiance of Victorian proprieties, but it is this very defiance with which has been responsible for the revival in the interest of the novel today. This factor is borne out by Chopin's own words throughout her Preface -- where she indicates that women were not recipients of equal treatment. (Chopin, Preface ) Edna takes her own life at the book's end, not because of remorse over having committed adultery but because she can no longer struggle against the social conventions which deny her fulfillment as a person and as a woman. Like Kate Chopin herself, Edna is an artist and a woman of sensitivity who believes that her identity as a woman involves more than being a wife and mother. It is this very type of independent thinking which was viewed as heretical in a society which sought to deny women any meaningful participation.
During the late nineteenth century, the time of protagonist Edna Pontellier, a woman's place in society was confined to worshipping her children and submitting to her husband. Kate Chopin's novel, The Awakening, encompasses the frustrations and the triumphs in a woman's life as she attempts to cope with these strict cultural demands. Defying the stereotype of a "mother-woman," Edna battles the pressures of 1899 that command her to be a subdued and devoted housewife. Although Edna's ultimate suicide is a waste of her struggles against an oppressive society, The Awakening supports and encourages feminism as a way for women to obtain sexual freedom, financial independence, and individual identity.
Her memory of running away from her Father and church when she was a young girl living in Kentucky shows how desperate she is to be free. However, Edna gives up her hopes of freedom for marriage in the hopes that all will fall into place afterwards. Edna’s expectation that marriage and children is proven false when she still is not happy with her life afterwards. She feels that life is worthless and that there should be more to what she is. Edna is not like the other creole mothers; she holds an affection for her children, but it comes and goes. Occasionally she will hold them fiercely to her chest and yet others she will forget them. Her husband disapproves of her lack of maternal instinct and rebukes her when he discovers one of their children, Raoul, sick in his bed. Edna is not alarmed by it, but his harsh words make her burst into tears on the front porch, after he has fallen asleep. Mr. Pontellier does not care about his wife much as a person, only as something he owns. He views everything this way, new lace curtains, glassware, furniture. He is disappointed in his wife because, in his view, she does not function well as a mother. Edna’s lack of