Finding True Freedom in The Awakening Kate Chopin's novel, The Awakening details the endeavors of heroine Edna Pontellier to cope with the realization that she is not, nor can she ever be, the woman she wants to be. Edna has settled for less. She is married for all the wrong reasons, saddled with the burden of motherhood, and trapped by social roles that would never release her. The passage below is only one of the many tender and exquisitely sensory passages that reveal Edna’s soul to the reader. "The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, dancing, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace."(32) When Edna's one chance for change; her only hope, Robert, deserts her, she realizes that her dreams are unachievable. It is this grim acceptance that steals our heroine's last shard of optimism from her. Edna Pontellier's suicide is completely believable, justifiable, and understandable. This world was too cruel for her tender spirit; this life too stifling for her to bear. None of this surprises me. How many women (or men, for that matter) go through life with their eyes closed? How many find it easier to simply shut out the ugliness and horror that surrounds them? Finally seeing the loathsome existence they are a part of can simply be "too much" for many to sustain. Utter despair and hopelessness soon devour that fragile soul, with frailty too great for this existence. Mr. Pontellier's thoughts reveal much about Edna's nature to us, and perhaps most of her mistakes as well. He feels that "his wife... ... middle of paper ... ... The social roles she was trying to break away from would never really have released her. "Leonce and the children…were a part of her life. But they need not have thought that they could possess her, body and soul" (137). I find myself wishing that she had never opened her eyes; that she could have lived out her days blissfully ignorant of the circumstances which bound her. This being impossible, even more than the idea of a life of her own, Edna chose the only possible option to escape from an existence full of unfulfilled desires and unhappiness. Edna re-enters the sea; scene of her first taste of power and emancipation. She returns because it offers her the only other possible freedom she is allowed; the freedom of death. It is not an act of weakness, or romanticism…it is that of a woman claiming her liberty, her strength…and her self…one last time.
Throughout Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening, the main protagonist Edna Pontellier, ventures through a journey of self-discovery and reinvention. Mrs.Pontellier is a mother and wife who begins to crave more from life, than her assigned societal roles. She encounters two opposite versions of herself, that leads her to question who she is and who she aims to be. Mrs. Pontellier’s journey depicts the struggle of overcoming the scrutiny women face, when denying the ideals set for them to abide. Most importantly the end of the novel depicts Mrs.Pontellier as committing suicide, as a result of her ongoing internal
Department of Labor. (2013). The worker adjustment and retraining notification act [Fact sheet]. Retrieved from http://www.doleta.gov/programs/factsht/warn.htm
Oryx and Crake offers plentiful examples of failed mother-child relationships.Jimmy’s complicated relationship with his mother is developed most thoroughly. Herdistance, depression, and distraction stem from the work she does. Like Offred’s motherin The Handmaid’s Tale, she stays busy working. Unlike Offred’s mother (whose careeris never specified), Jimmy’s mother works for a large bio-technology corporation. Herprofessional status as a microbiologist, unthinkable in the patriarchal culture of Gilead,should make a progressive, positive statement about women’s achievement of equality.Her work ultimately threatens her sanity, though. As a result, she abandons her onlychild.
Boston, Gabriella. "Review of Much Ado about Nothing.." Washington Times (16 Nov. 2002): D2. Rpt. in Shakespearean Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 88. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Jan. 2014.
Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” American Historical Review, 89 (June 1984). Web. 26 May 2015.
For this Assignment 2, I decided to contrast and compare two different interviews from two states and to make it easy I will give a background history of the Jim Crow laws and where the term is cultural folklore background and when was abolished. In this paper I would demonstrate the influence of the Jim Crow laws and how these laws continue to create an environment of segregation
Smith, Lindsay. "Much Ado About Nothing Concept Analysis." Novelinks.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Jan. 2014.
Edna is awakened to the fact that she has no lasting relationship with anyone in her life. Her friendships with women are surface level and not genuine and her relationship with Robert crumble with a note, “Good-by -- because I love you.” That note acted as the last straw for young Edna who was completely alone in the isolated world she created for herself, a saddening image. “[Her solitary swim] is clearly symbolized by the final episode in the book: her solitary swim far out into the emptiness of the Gulf” (Ringe 587). She stripped down, possibly symbolizing her complete surrender of all facades and schemes and went into the vast ocean. Whether she intended to take her own life or not is still debated, but one thing is for sure, she was trying to escape reality once again, but it cost her
Being a woman, she is completely at the mercy of her husband. He provides for her a lifestyle she could not obtain on her own and fixes her place in society. This vulnerability stops Edna from being truly empowered. To gain independence as a woman, and as a person, Edna must relinquish the stability and comfort she finds in the relationship with her husband. Mr. and Mrs. Pontellier's marriage comprises a series of power plays and responds well to Marxist and Feminist Theory. Leonce Pontellier looks "…at his wife as one who looks at a valuable piece of property…". He views her as an accessory that completes the ideal life for him. Edna, however, begins to desire autonomy and independence from Leonce, so true to the feminist point of view.
Her ultimate downfall is received through the assumptions that the repercussions to her actions will have no effect on her and that they will resolve themselves. When becoming bored with her housewife routine, Edna starts up a steamy affair with a man named Robert. He eventually leaves to go to Mexico, symbolizing how unstable the decisions Edna is making are. This instability follows her back into her family life, and she decides to become independent. But, the unhealthy spirals she submits herself to earlier in the novel continue, leading to her death by drowning in the end, “She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known”(Chopin,125); an act that symbolizes the embrace of social death she experienced in her life.
Standing outside on the deck when I pulled in next to his VW was Mike, most likely because I had sent him a text 5 minutes prior to tell him I was close. Picture a scruffy bearded, blond hair, blue-eyed, white Canadian that stands about 5 feet 10 inches tall and probably 180 pounds. Still, somehow he's always come off as a pretty boy. He dresses what you might call alternative, and doesn't talk like the stereotypical rapper. After collecting what I needed, I walked up the stone walkway. It smelt like the grass had just been cut that morning, and the yard, small, still very elegant. It had a couple waist-high shrubs and hedges along the fence line.
Jim Crow was more than a series of rigid anti-black laws. It was a way of life. Under Jim Crow, African Americans were relegated to the status of second class citizens” (“What was Jim Crow”, n.d.). As a matter of fact, “Jim Crow represented the legitimization of anti-black racism” (“What was Jim Crow”, n.d.). From the accounts of two different individuals from two different states of the United States the myriad facets of the sufferings experienced during the Jim Crow era by the blacks can be known. From the narrative of Edward Gamble, Sr., an octogenarian from Moultrie, Georgia, the agonies of the blacks in the Jim Crow south can be ascertained. One of the pivotal facts that can be learned from Gamble’s narration is that, the economic segregation was, just like the racial segregation, quite acute during the Jim Crow era in the south. In Florida, where Edward Gamble spent his youth, only some typical jobs were meant for the blacks and to be precise, those jobs were menial and not sophisticated at
Saks, A. M., & Burke, L. A. (2012). An investigation into the relationship between training evaluation and the transfer of training. International Journal of Training & Development, 16(2), 118-127.
After review of latest research papers and publications, skill gap in textile industry has been analysed in different conventional sectors as like spinning, weaving, processing and garmenting and based on that most appropriate training programmes and methodology of training has been suggested.
In her last days when she saw the family doctor, he reflected her thoughts best by saying, "The trouble is...that youth is given up to illusions. It seems to be a provision of Nature, a decoy to secure mothers for the race. And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost." Often in life we never see the consequences of our actions. We are never given the chance to see how our lives might be had we made different decisions . But, the story of Edna Pontellier, the wife, mother, hostess and friend, showed all too clearly a woman who was really a lover, a painter, an outcast, and a soul who knew to well what might have been.