Finding Freedom in Kate Chopin's The Awakening

671 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Problems that Edna faces in the awakening

Finding Freedom in The Awakening

The Awakening was shocking to readers in 1899, and would be today if it were published in “Ladies Home Journal”. Even today, women are expected to sacrifice themselves, if not to their husbands, then definitely to their children. I find it interesting that Grand Isle is the setting for the beginning and end of the novel. The story is built around a circle and represents the whirling force that is the energy of Edna’s life. The circle reminds me of Yeats’ “The Second Coming” : “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/things fall apart/the center cannot hold.”

So often I wanted Edna to act and she didn’t, I suppose that it is Chopin’s purpose to not let us into Edna’s thoughts, or make us omniscient of her actions. This was hard for me while reading. I wanted Edna’s point of view, so I could EASILY figure out what she was going to do, and that’s what was most difficult about this novel, and the reason it is not an easy read. I guess this is Chopin’s purpose. An example is when Edna cannot pinpoint why she is crying - the reader is left just as confused as Edna about the emotions.

The sleep motif is very enlightening, in that key moments of Edna’s awakening are preceded by sleep. Sleep, especially for those who are depressed, is used as a way of escape, but in this novel sleep is used mystically as a way for Chopin to show that many things happen while Edna is sleeping that leads to awakening. In this way, the reader can only guess what occurs during sleep.

I found I related to Harding Davis’ work more in that I can relate to Hugh and Deb’s oppression (politically, economically, class structurally). One thing the two works have in common is that both main characters (Hugh and Edna) actually hold the key to their own oppression, yet Edna’s social condition doesn’t require much sympathy from the reader. Also, if a reader cannot step into that world with Chopin, it is difficult to comprehend that kind of oppression. Perhaps it’s not correct to use the term oppression when writing about Edna, as it seems she only lives a life of obligations. She breaks free of these, however, and realizes: “Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual.

Show More
Related

  • John Marshall, Defender of the Constitutio

    1613 Words  | 4 Pages

    John Marshall was born in Virginia in 1755. Stites describes him as a Virginian "by birth, upbringing, disposition, and property (Stites 1)." His father, Thomas Marshall, was one of the most prominent and ambitious men of his time, and had a major impact on John. At age nineteen, John Marshall made his first impression when he joined the Fauquier County Militia as a lieutenant to fight in the American Revolution. Marshall's education included three months of law study at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. Even though his education was limited, it was better than most of the political figures of his time. Marshall obtained his license to practice law on August 28, 1780 in Fauquier County.

    Read More

  • Identity and Society's Expectations In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

    598 Words  | 2 Pages

    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).

    Read More

  • growaw Personal Growth and Death of Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening

    992 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Awakening is a novel about the growth of a woman becoming her own person; in spite of the expectations society has for her. The book follows Edna Pontellier  as she struggles to find her identity. Edna knows that she cannot be happy filling the role that society has created for her. She did not believe that she could break from this pattern because of the pressures of society. As a result she ends up taking her own life.  However, readers should not sympathize with her for taking her own life.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Von Balthasar's 'A Riddle Unto Itself'

    1476 Words  | 3 Pages

    The first passage, “A Riddle unto Itself” talks about the idea that I human being is like a riddle. However, as we know, riddles are meant to be solved, but if a human being is a riddle, “that it would thus be a contradiction if it solved its own puzzle because it would not longer be this enigma” (60). Because the human by itself cannot solve its own riddle, then someone has to solve or give the answers to that human, but who would this someone be. I would say that this is the

    Read More

  • Music And Ednas Awakening

    411 Words  | 1 Pages

    Chopin’s Impromptu arouses "the very passions ... within [Edna’s] soul"(p.34). The harmony, fluidity, subtle rhythm and poetic beauty of the Romantic composer make Edna loose herself in the music that stirs her emotions. The art completes, for her, what nature cannot bring to a finish. The exquisite, looping, and often fiery melodies of the Impromptu make a cut in Edna’s mind through the conventional beliefs about people and society. Because she is not a musician, her listening is based on intuition, allowing for a direct apprehension of the music by the soul and leading to a confrontation with the reality itself — the reality of "solitude, of hope, of longing, ... of despair"(p.34). This is the beginning of Edna’s awakening, for such emotions, especially despair, are not an end but a beginning because they take away the excuses and guilts, those toward herself, from which she suffers. This revelation of previously hidden conflicts gives birth to dramatic emotions within Edna. It is so powerful that Edna wonders if she "shall ever be stirred again as...Reisz’s playing moved" her that night (p.38).

    Read More

  • Theme Of Birth In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

    2916 Words  | 6 Pages

    Birth, whether of children or desires, plays a strong motif throughout The Awakening. The four components of childbirth, which Edna—the novel’s main character—recalls as she witnesses her friend Madame Ratignolle give birth, represent major themes Chopin emphasizes throughout her novel. These four components are “ecstasy of pain, the heavy odor of chloroform, a stupor which had deadened sensation, and an awakening to find a little new life” (133). In childbirth, the first three components are necessary to achieve the fourth: the awakening to find a new life. The same is true of Edna’s thematic self-discovery, only the sequence is slightly reordered. It begins instead with chloroform but ends the same: with an awakening or, for Edna, the discovery of her own desires.

    Read More

  • Identity Themes In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

    791 Words  | 2 Pages

    By Edna finding herself in the book she was freeing herself. In the novel Edna finds a new hobby, painting. Painting was her escape from the world, and it made her feel good. In the novel it says that “Mrs. Pontellier had brought her sketching materials, which she sometimes dabbled with in an unprofessional way. She liked the dabbling. She felt in it satisfaction of a kind which no other employment afforded her.”(V pg 15) Chopin explain the feeling that Edna gets while painting. It is a feeling that nothing else give her, and that is why she does it even though she is not good. Painting is what gets Edna through because it is not easy becoming you own person. When thing seem to go left Edna paints. The novel Mr. Pontellier make a comment “’It seems to me the utmost folly for a woman at the head of a household, and the mother of children, to spend in an atelier day which would be better employed contriving for the comfort of her family.’" (XIX pg 62) This comment represent how society worked back then. In responds to his statement Edna just said "I feel like painting,"(XIX pg 62) By her say she wants to go paint after Mr. Pontellier made that comment Chopin is show that Edna is escaping, or freeing herself from society. Most women need some type of escape for themselves. They need something that will get them through the process of becoming free. They need something that will make them feel good when they are

    Read More

  • The True Identity In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

    1882 Words  | 4 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Awakening

    2436 Words  | 5 Pages

    The fact that Edna is an artist is significant, insofar as it allows her to have a sensibility as developed as the author's. Furthermore, Edna is able to find in Mlle. Reisz, who has established herself as a musician, a role model who inspires her in her efforts at independence. Mlle. Reisz, in confiding to Edna that "You are the only one worth playing for," gives evidence of the common bond which the two of them feel as women whose sensibilities are significantly different from those of the common herd. The French heritage which Edna absorbed through her Creole upbringing allowed her, like Kate Chopin herself, to have knowledge or a way of life that represented a challenge to dominant Victorian conventions.

    Read More

  • Essay Comparing The Awakening and Story of an Hour

    779 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.”

    Read More

  • Kate Chopin's novella, The Awakening

    869 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Chopin's Awakening, the reader meets Edna Pontellier, a married woman who attempts to overcome her "fate", to avoid the stereotypical role of a woman in her era, and in doing so she reveals the surrounding. society's assumptions and moral values about women of Edna's time. Edna helps to reveal the assumptions of her society. The people surrounding her each day, particularly women, assume their roles as "housewives"; while the men are free to leave the house, go out at night, gamble, drink and work. Edna surprises her associates when she takes up painting, which represents a working job and independence for Edna.

    Read More

  • Compare And Contrast Frederick Douglass And Malcolm X

    1008 Words  | 3 Pages

    He wanted to be able to properly write his thoughts and opinions out to be understood. He wanted to leave an impression on people to give them a thought of him exceeding his education far beyond the eighth grade. That impression was credited to his “prison studies” (Malcolm X 1). He had a voice that needed to be heard all over to bring a change to society. He self educated himself day and night with the dictionary, teachings ,and books. Malcolm X considered that “three or four hours of sleep a night” was enough (Malcolm X 3). Malcolm X became interested in the “glorious history of the black man” (Malcolm X 3). “Book after book” showed him the “white man had brought upon the world’s black, brown,red,and yellow peoples every variety of the suffering of exploitation” (Malcolm X 4). Like Douglass, Malcolm found the “Faustian machinations” of the “white man” against the “non-white victims” (Malcolm X). Douglass states, “I feared they might be treacherous.” Unlike Douglass being social and receiving help from others around , Malcolm was to himself and seeked information on his own through books. Malcolm X had more pride in his education and wasn 't afraid to share his knowledge, “Mr. Muhammed, to whom I was writing daily, had no idea of what a new world had opened up to me through my efforts to document his teachings in books” (Malcolm X 6). Malcolm X had some basic education knowledge

    Read More

  • Emotivism, Egoism, And Kant's Theory

    1258 Words  | 3 Pages

    Therefore, Sarah will obey the law and not steal the food from the supermarket since stealing doesn’t comply with the rule to be universal. In this the maxim will not allow her as the maxim doesn’t say “Everyone can steal from the shop”. Sarah will watch her children starve because of her moral obligation Kant argued regarding maxim. In addition, Sarah is complying with Means-end principal, as follows the rule of treating people respectful, in this case the shop owner’s family. Sarah will respect the property of the family, even if saving her children will provide happiness.

    Read More

  • Edna's Struggle for Power in Chopin's The Awakening

    1390 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Importance of College Education

    1357 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...all of the sides to whether college is worth the cost, it is evident that college is in fact worth the cost of tuition. College should be looked at as an investment. A college education will give the graduate more money in the end, than they invested. Even though there are temptations in college, the advantages that college gives their students far surpasses the amount of temptations there are along the way. Most college graduates graduate, and earn a degree by surpassing the temptations college gives, and instead taking in all of the advantages that it is able to offer. Even though college, becomes a redundant seven letter word, that people often get tired of hearing, college is the right step in life, for students after high school. A college education is a valuable investment that everyone should strive to achieve, and is completely worth the expensive cost.

    Read More

More about Finding Freedom in Kate Chopin's The Awakening

Open Document