Themes In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

Many great authors manage to introduce the major themes in their work in the opening scene. By doing so, they hook their readers and excite them to read more. Kate Chopin masters this in her novel The Awakening. Her novel is about a "woman who has led the conventional life of an upper-middle-class wife and mother until the age of twenty-eight, then finds herself feeling so frustrated and suffocated that she is willing to defy the conventions of Louisiana Creole society to gain spiritual independence" (Delaney 1). Chopin hints at three themes in the first chapter of her novel; identity, love, and marriage.

This entire novel is about an identity crisis. At the start of the novel, Edna Pontellier is a wife who barely accepts the constraints

It 's used in jest by the community (Robert Lebrun in particular), and we also know that Edna has a crush on the aforementioned Robert because she took a walk on the beach with him instead of her husband. Women don 't walk on the beach with other men when they 're truly in love with their husbands. It 's obvious Robert likes Edna back when Mr. Pontellier asks Robert to go with him to Klein 's hotel and Robert admitted "that he preferred to stay where he was and talk to Mrs. Pontellier" (Chopin 1255). Men don 't talk with women, that are married, when their husband is not present unless they 're secretly in

During this time, the man was the one to make all the orders and if he didn 't want to do something, he didn 't have to. The woman, however, had to submit herself to her husband and obey his commands. It was ok for the man to go somewhere and not tell his wife any details like, where he is going, how long he was going to be gone, or who he would be with. The woman, well, she had to stay home and take care of the home and children. We can see where Mr. Pontellier (the husband) is like one of those husbands in the line, "Coming back to dinner?" his wife called after him. He halted a moment and shrugged his shoulders. He felt in his vest pocket; there was a ten-dollar bill there. He did not know; perhaps he would return for the early dinner and perhaps he would not. It all depended upon the company which he found over at Klein 's and the size of the game" (Chopin 1255). As the book progresses, Mrs. Pontellier begins to grow very tired of his behavior and disobey his commands. She makes her own decisions about how she wants to spend time. By the end of the book, she is so confused about the whole marriage thing that she doesn 't even want to marry the man she really