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Essay on kate chopins the awakening and how edna goes through non conformity
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Until the middle of the twentieth century, females were in an inferior position to males in all aspects of society. Women who wanted to deviate from the norm were often restrained by males and isolated in a sphere of society’s “perfectly submissive housewife”, a stereotype which women of the world eventually shattered. Kate Chopin accomplished this through her realist piece, The Awakening.
In The Awakening, Mr. and Mrs. Pontellier have retreated to their summer home, located on Grand Isle, just south of New Orleans. While on the Isle, Mr. Léonce Pontellier is often occupied with business affairs or otherwise absent and spends most evenings dining at the club instead of the house. Mrs. Edna Pontellier is responsible for what may be considered duties of housewifery, including caring for the children—although it is often the case that others are looking after them. She chooses to spend her days working in her atelier, resting on the porch, and swimming, usually with her slightly younger companion, Robert, whom she has developed a unique fondness for. Although outward appearances may regard them as a typical, upper-middle class, American family, a glimpse into the inner-workings of their home, marriage, and thoughts would suggest otherwise.
As the summer progresses, Mrs. Pontellier finds herself being continuously intrigued by and wanting to spend more time with Robert. The pair often walks or swims together, and the combination of time with Robert and the “voice of the sea” appear to propel her through a literal awakening, in which she recognizes her desire to become independent of the social bounds of marriage—free to do as she pleases (Chopin 571). She decides then that “She [wants] to swim far out, where no woman [has] swum befo...
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...edicating herself to any of the available social roles leads her to abandon all of them in favor of an enticing yet ever elusive freedom” (Ramos 147). Arguably, Kate Chopin used realist writing such as The Awakening to break through the barriers built up by society’s image of male superiority and female acquiescence and push American literature deeper into an era of modernity.
Works Cited
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. 1899. 1865-1914. Ed. Nina Baym and Robert S. Levine. 8th ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. 561-652. Print. Vol. C of The Norton Anthology of American Literature.
Ramos, Peter. "Unbearable Realism: Freedom, Ethics and Identity in 'The Awakening.'" College Literature 37.4 (2010): 145-65. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 28 May 2014. .
middle of paper ... ... e Awakening." 1899. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Ed.
Chopin, Kate. "The Awakening." The Norton Anthology of American Literature.. Gen. ed. Nina Baym. 8th ed. Vol. C. New York: Norton, 2012. 561-652. Print.
Leonce Pontellier, the husband of Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening, becomes very perturbed when his wife, in the period of a few months, suddenly drops all of her responsibilities. After she admits that she has "let things go," he angrily asks, "on account of what?" Edna is unable to provide a definite answer, and says, "Oh! I don't know. Let me along; you bother me" (108). The uncertainty she expresses springs out of the ambiguous nature of the transformation she has undergone. It is easy to read Edna's transformation in strictly negative terms‹as a move away from the repressive expectations of her husband and society‹or in strictly positive terms‹as a move toward the love and sensuality she finds at the summer beach resort of Grand Isle. While both of these moves exist in Edna's story, to focus on one aspect closes the reader off to the ambiguity that seems at the very center of Edna's awakening. Edna cannot define the nature of her awakening to her husband because it is not a single edged discovery; she comes to understand both what is not in her current situation and what is another situation. Furthermore, the sensuality that she has been awakened to is itself not merely the male or female sexuality she has been accustomed to before, but rather the sensuality that comes in the fusion of male and female. The most prominent symbol of the book‹the ocean that she finally gives herself up to‹embodies not one aspect of her awakening, but rather the multitude of contradictory meanings that she discovers. Only once the ambiguity of this central symbol is understood can we read the ending of the novel as a culmination and extension of the themes in the novel, and the novel regains a...
Her transformation and journey to self-discovery truly begins on the family’s annual summer stay at Grand Isle. “At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life- that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions. That summer at Grand Isle she began to loosen a little of the mantle of reserve that had always enveloped her” (Chopin 26). From that point onward, Edna gains a deeper sense of desire for self-awareness and the benefits that come from such an odyssey. She suddenly feels trapped in her marriage, without being in a passionately romantic relationship, but rather a contractual marriage. Edna questions her ongoing relationship with Leonce; she ponders what the underlying cause of her marriage was to begin with; a forbidden romance, an act of rebellion against her father, or a genuine attraction of love and not lust? While Edna internally questions, she begins to entertain thoughts of other men in her life, eventually leading to sensuous feelings and thoughts related to sexual fantasy imagined through a relationship with Robert Lebrun. Concurrently, Edna wavers the ideas so clearly expected by the society- she analyzes and examines; why must women assimilate to rigid societal standards while men have no such
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.
Kate Chopin's novella, The Awakening. In Kate Chopin's novella, The Awakening, the reader is introduced into. a society that is strictly male-dominated where women fill in the stereotypical role of watching the children, cooking, cleaning and keeping up with appearances. Writers often highlight the values of a certain society by introducing a character who is alienated from their culture by a trait such as gender, race, or creed.
Masturzo, Sharon. A Guide to Internet Resources for Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). University of South Florida. 14 Feb. 2000.
As the story unfolds, we learn that, although Edna Pontellier lives in relative luxury in the French Quarter of New Orleans with a successful businessman for a husband and two young boys, she is unhappy about the direction her life is headed. Edna's "awakening" begins when she realizes that she is living her life for others and not herself. The story takes place in the late nineteenth century, a time when women were expected to stay at home and take care of the children, with little independence. Edna decides to pursue her passion of painting making it even harder for her husband Léonce to understand her. She is stepping out of the traditional routine of women, leaving her husband to believe that she may be coming down with a sickness. However, Edna's thoughts are simply filled with her fantasies of Robert. Every summer the Pontellier's vacation at an upscale resort on Grand Isle. This is where Edna first encounters Robert Lebrun spending most of her days with him; she is taken by his love. The narrator says, "She could only realize that she herself... was in some way different from the other self. That she was ...
Works Cited Franklin, R. F. "The Awakening and the Failure of the Psyche. " American Literature 56 (Summer 1984): 510-526. Platizky, R. "Chopin's Awakening. " Explicator 53 (Winter 1995): 99-102. Seyersted, P. Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography.
Koloski, Bernard, ed. Preface. Approaches to Teaching Chopin's The Awakening. By Koloski. New York: MLA, 1988.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. A Norton Critical Edition: Kate Chopin: The Awakening. Ed. Margo Culley. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994. 3-109.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym et al. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985.
Chopin, Kate. Walker, Nancy A. ed. The Awakening Boston, NY Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press. (c) 1993.
Throughout the novel, The Awakening, Chopin establishes the feminist view in the book. The Awakening explores one woman’s desire to find and live fully within her true self. Her devotion to that purposes causes friction with her friends and family, and also conflicts with the dominant values of her time. Her primary thought throughout the book is that women shouldn’t do what society always tells them. Sometimes people need to find their true selves and when we do that we find our true happiness and sometimes you gain things you never had or thought you needed. In the book, Edna begins the process of identifying her true self, the self that exists apart from the identity she maintains as a wife and mother, Robert unknowingly encourages her by indulging her emerging sensuality (Houghton).
Bryfonski, Dedria, ed. Women's Issues in Kate Chopin's The Awakening. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven, 2012. Print.