The Awakening

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Recommended: Gender roles throughout literature

The short novel, The Awakening, begins at a crisis in Edna Pontellier's life. Edna is a free-spirited and passionate woman who has a hard time finding means of communications and a real role as a wife and a mother. Edna finds herself desperately wanting her own emotional and sexual identities. During one summer while her husband, Leonce, is out of town on business, her frustration and need for emotional freedom leads to an affair with a younger man. Her search for identity and love leads her on a wild ride against society and tests her strengths to the end.
The book raises issues about the role of women in society, not only in the time period in which it is set, but also in the modern world. Edna was truly brave in the way that she slowly began to defy society's conventions. She was never unfaithful to her husband because he had betrayed her by seeing her as an object. This contributed to her yearning for truth and freedom. Her husband was a well-meaning man, but Edna had no real trust in him. She felt empty with him and their children. Once Leonce was gone and Edna had been with Robert, she felt like she had found true and passionate love, but she had not. Robert was like Leonce. Robert speaks of her being "set free and given to her" and she realizes that Robert also viewed women as possessions. This was a trouble that she could not get away from. Robert loved her, but the way that he thought was still being controlled by the society and time that they lived in. Edna realizes that her loving and lusty relationship with Robert would still be repressed by the society that they were

in. That is not what Edna wanted. She could not hold back her feelings and continue living the way that she was. Edna did not want to live a life that would have her lying to her children, and raising them would have been painful to her without truth. She felt that if she were to follow through with being with Robert, she would be taking away their expression and personal freedom. Edna was a very strong woman in the light that she did not want to give herself away. She strove to be an independent and self-sufficient individual.
In the time period which Edna was in, women had few choices in the case of divorce, and men took the sole custody of their children.

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