The Awakening by Kate Chopin is a novel about a young and rebellious woman’s struggle to free herself from her roles of being a mother and wife. Charlotte Rich who is an assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University focuses her research on “turn-of-the- century Americans writers, particularly women and multicultural writers…” deeply analyzed The Awakening and wrote an article about it (121). In addition, this main character, Edna Pontellier, challenges the positions and actions expected of women during this time in the 1890’s. The different ideas expressed in this book caused much criticism during its time of publication in 1899 because it was unheard of to defy the loyalty expected in a wife. Edna openly admits to loving another …show more content…
Kate Chopin symbolizes Edna’s struggle and “awakening” of being set free from the burdens of her life through the descriptions and imagery of birds. Throughout the entire book, Chopin uses several types of birds to symbolize Edna through her struggle and later her awakening when she grows to be more independent and challenges the positions of being a wife. Chopin states in the first chapter, “A green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage outside the door, kept repeating over and over: ‘Allez vous-en! Allez vous-en!’” (5). This statement is french for “Get out! Get out!” At this time, the parrot’s confinement to this cage is just like Edna’s confinement to her routine, ways of life, and everything that is naturally expected of her of a married woman and mother. Parrots can only mimic things they have learned or what they have already been taught similar to Edna’s same routine. During the summer months, the Pontelliers, live on Grand Isle which is an island of the coast of New Orleans, and then during the winter months they …show more content…
Edna married into a family with Creole and French background who commonly speak French around her; a language in which she is not completely fluent in. As the story gradually progresses, Edna is becoming more independent and stepping outside the boundaries of her comfort zone. This is her ways of acting out of her own free will just like birds do when they begin to explore outside of the nest they grew up in. However, not many other people are acknowledging any of these changes because most of it is how she feels about things. After the parrot is shrieking “get out,’ Chopin states, “He [the parrot] could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood, unless it was the mocking-bird that hung on the other side of the door, whistling his fluty notes out upon the breeze with maddening persistence,” (Chopin 5). Edna tells a few of her friends that she begins to feel differently and implies that she wants to explore other things. The only friend that can relate to Edna and truly understand what she is going through in Mademoiselle Reisz, a finest pianist. Therefore, the mockingbird is a symbol of Mademoiselle Reisz because it is also trapped in a cage and understands the parrot which represents Edna. The two women use music to understand each other. This is also why the parrot and mockingbird always appear together trying to
This story is entertaining , but yet powerful at the same time. It has many themes that the audience can identify with. Some themes include love, sexual, society standards, and isolation. These themes make the book have several feelings and several interpretations. Not only themes makes the book more intense but also the use of Figurative language. Kate Chopin uses imagery, personification, metaphors, similes, syntax, and mostly symbolism. Symbolism plays an important role throughout the book because it tells the reader exactly how they feel using objects, characters, figures, and colors to represent abstract ideas
The presence of birds in the first passage of The Awakening seems to foreshadow some of the characteristics of the protagonist. It is rather interesting that the parrot is outdoors, while the mockingbird is inside. Perhaps this would represent the presence of opposites in this novel. The parrot seems to be provoking the mockingbird in order to get some sort of response. This seems to point to the presence of loneliness which the protagonist feels. However he is being rather anti social by stating “Allez vous-en! Alez Vous! Saprisit! That’s all right!” I may be wrong, but I believe that means “Go Away! Go Away! Damn it” in French. This altercation between the parrot and the mockingbird could point to the presence of a jealous conflict within the characters. On the surface it seems that the parrot is rather agitated that the mockingbird, a bird that is generally found outdoors, is inside while the parrot, a domesticated pet is kept outside. Ironically though both birds are actually trapped with the parrot being held in the cage and the mockingbird being trapped indoors. The cage symbolizes being trapped whether literally or figuratively. Also the presence of characters that are not understood by their surroundings might shed some light on the inner conflict of the novel. It is also useful to point out that the parrot, a bird which mimics it’s surroundings is being mimicked by a bird which also mimics, such as a mockingbird. The may point to the possible presence of a theme of mimicry in this novel.
The passage begins with color symbolism: the parrot is yellow and green. As someone in class pointed out last week, yellow often symbolized cowardice or fear while green symbolizes youth, newness, or growth. As the parrot is specifically described as being caged, this color symbolism could illustrate Edna’s fear either of being confined or of all that breaking away from confinement would entail. Next, the parrot “kept repeating over and over,” indicating persistence; though confined, it is determined. The phrase it repeats in French translates to “Go away, for God’s sake!” With this phrase the parrot attempts to separate from some force of opposition. Also, the fact that it speaks French as well as Spanish “and also a language which nobody understood” suggests that, like Edna’s understanding of her identity as a woman, her individuality, and her sexuality, by knowing several languages the parrot also understands more than does the average person (or bird?), though it is itself misunderstood. The mockingbird serves as an antagonist to the parrot, or a symbolic representation of the forces that oppose Edna. The description of its “fluty notes” sounds pretty and feminine, in contrast with the harshness of the parrot; similarly, Edna struggles with the pretty, feminine roles that are forced upon her within her society with “maddening persistence,” a constant threat to drown out the parrot’s, and Edna’s, voice.
The tile of the poem “Bird” is simple and leads the reader smoothly into the body of the poem, which is contained in a single stanza of twenty lines. Laux immediately begins to describe a red-breasted bird trying to break into her home. She writes, “She tests a low branch, violet blossoms/swaying beside her” and it is interesting to note that Laux refers to the bird as being female (Laux 212). This is the first clue that the bird is a symbol for someone, or a group of people (women). The use of a bird in poetry often signifies freedom, and Laux’s use of the female bird implies female freedom and independence. She follows with an interesting image of the bird’s “beak and breast/held back, claws raking at the pan” and this conjures a mental picture of a bird who is flying not head first into a window, but almost holding herself back even as she flies forward (Laux 212). This makes the bird seem stubborn, and follows with the theme of the independent female.
This realization stems from a number of events that occur throughout the story, but Plath’s usage of symbolism with the heather birds encapsulates this idea in the best manner possible. Millicent’s first chronological encounter with the heather birds is with a man at the back of a bus, the setting for one of the aforementioned trials. When asked by Millicent what he had for breakfast, he simply replies with "Heather birds' eyebrows”, heather birds being creatures that “live on the mythological moors and fly about all day long, singing wild and sweet in the sun…” (Plath something). Her reaction to this is a fit of laughter and a newly found comradeship that overpowers her fears of “the remainder of the humiliating tasks put upon her during the initiation process, because she truly does not mind being an “other.”” (Yasoni something). This disconnect from the sorority only continues to grow through the story until the end where she compares the sparrows she observes to the heatherbirds. Her description of the sparrows, “ pale gray-brown birds in a flock, one like the other, all exactly alike” (Plath a page) is a representation of the sorority girls, a herd of characters who do not care for freedom, individuality or any form of expression that deviates from their standards. This is contrasted with her description of the heather birds, “Swooping carefree over the moors, they would go singing and crying out across the great spaces … strong and proud in their freedom and their sometime loneliness” (another quote please). The man and the heather birds allow Millicent to accept her differences and the differences of others in order to be a happy and free being. This final development provides an optimistic conclusion to the story, where Millicent is no longer held back by her
Kate Chopin’s The Awakening takes place in the late 19th century, in Grande Isle off the coast of Louisiana. The author writes about the main character, Edna Pontellier, to express her empowering quality of life. Edna is a working housewife,and yearns for social freedom. On a quest of self discovery, Edna meets Madame Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz, falls in and out of love,and eventually ends up taking her own life. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening shows how the main character Edna Pontellier has been trapped for so many years and has no freedom, yet Edna finally “awakens” after so long to her own power and her ability to be free.
In chapter VI, Edna begins to respond to this voice inside of her, “The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude ... to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation” (14). The very sight and sound of the sea entices her. The author depicts the sea as an invigorating object that gives Edna life. The sea embodies Edna and gives her the confidence to express her feelings. Even the sight of the sea, empowers Edna. This is the first time where Chopin displays Edna’s amelioration towards society. In previous chapters Edna hesitates from communicating her opinions, “When it came her turn to read it, she did so with profound astonishment...It was openly criticised... Mrs. Pontellier gave over being astonished, and concluded that wonders would never cease.” (11). Women were expected to conform to societal norms and remain subservient but Edna ceased to live her life this way. Chapter VI opens her eyes to the issues of society that prevented women from freely living, "Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world and within around her.”(14). Through listening, smelling and hearing the sea, Edna grasps her craving for a life where she is considered a human being rather than
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
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.
“Edna, like Walt, falls in love with her own body, and her infatuation with the inadequate Robert is merely a screen for her overwhelming obsession, which is to nurse and mother herself” (Modern Critical Views 2). Edna Pontellier is an estimable woman of the tardy 1800s who not only apperceives that she owns many sexual desires, but additionally finds the vigor internally to digress from society’s code of conduct and builds up the nerve to act on them. Breaking through the role appointed to her by society, convivial protocol, and everyone who circumvents her, she finds herself determined to set her own identity, disinterested in both her husband and children. Many of Kate Chopin’s other stories feature zealous, and quite unconventional female
"In a little four-room house around the corner. It looks so cozy, so inviting and restful."(79) With this description Chopin introduces the reader to Edna’s new residence, which is affectionately known as the pigeon house. The pigeon house provides Edna with the comfort and security that her old house lacked. The tranquility that the pigeon house grants to Edna allows her to experience a freedom that she has never felt before.
Chopin mentions birds in a subtle way at many points in the plot and if looked at closely enough they are always linked back to Edna and her journey of her awakening. In the first pages of the novella, Chopin reveals Madame Lebrun's "green and yellow parrot, which hung in a cage" (Chopin 1). The caged bird at the beginning of the novella points out Edna's subconscious feeling of being entrapped as a woman in the ideal of a mother-woman in Creole society. The parrot "could speak a little Spanish, and also a language which nobody understood" (1). The parrot's lack of a way to communicate because of the unknown language depicts Edna's inability to speak her true feelings and thoughts. It is for this reason that nobody understands her and what she is going through. A little further into the story, Madame Reisz plays a ballad on the piano. The name of which "was something else, but [Edna] called it Solitude.' When she heard it there came before her imagination the figure of a man standing on a desolate rock on the seashore His attitude was one of hopeless resignation as he looked toward a distant bird winging its flight away from him" (25). The bird in the distance symbolizes Edna's desire of freedom and the man in the vision shows the longing for the freedom that is so far out of reach. At the end of the story, Chopin shows "a bird with a broken wing beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water" while Edna is swimming in the ocean at the Grand Isle shortly before she drowns (115). The bird stands for the inability to stray from the norms of society and become independent without inevitably falling from being incapable of doing everything by herself. The different birds all have different meanings for Edna but they all show the progression of her awakening.
Ranging from caged parrots to the meadow in Kentucky, symbols and settings in The Awakening are prominent and provide a deeper meaning than the text does alone. Throughout The Awakening by Kate Chopin, symbols and setting recur representing Edna’s current progress in her awakening. The reader can interpret these and see a timeline of Edna’s changes and turmoil as she undergoes her changes and awakening.
Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening tells the story of Edna, a married woman, who falls in love with a man, Robert, in 19th century Louisiana. In the chosen passage the narrator describes Edna’s thoughts as to why she chose to go to the beach with Robert. The presence of the themes of freedom and solitude, convention versus individuality, and the theme of reflection all evoke Edna’s awakening in the novel.
According to the Louisiana society, Edna Pontellier has the ideal life, complete with two children and the best husband in the world. However, Edna disagrees, constantly crying over her feelings of oppression. Finally, Edna is through settling for her predetermined role in society as man’s possession, and she begins to defy this. Edna has the chance to change this stereotype, the chance to be “[t]he bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice” (112). The use of a metaphor comparing Edna to a bird proves her potential to rise above society’s standards and pave the pathway for future women. However, Edna does not have “strong [enough] wings” (112). After Robert, the love of her life and the man she has an affair with, leaves, Edna becomes despondent and lacks an...