From her crying alone at night to her sudden rebellious comment to her husband you can infer that she’s been holding something to herself. This quote peers into how Edna truly feels on…
On the surface Edna seems to have it all, the perfect life as it would be perceived by society. She has two children and a doctor for a husband. However, Edna doesn’t feel as if this completes her; instead, she enters a phase of self-discovery and a sense of finding passion again. Edna is trying to break traditional ties that claim that she should be a good mother-woman. This ultimately leads to her awakening or freedom from the life that she believes restricts her. Edna’s sense of awakening happens in stages with different aspects leading up to the final awakening. Her awakening is a cycle that is completed with many different events synching together to form a better understanding of Edna Pontellier.…
Edna’s first awaking happens in response to her being around people of Cajun descent who openly communicate and touch. While spending time on the beach with a Cajun women Edna is touched, this touch is not in a sexual way, but is outside the norm and starts Edna’s journey towards what she will accept versus what is socially acceptable. Edna says that mother-women “created the embodiment of every womanly grace and charm” {Baym 567). Edna does not consider herself to be a motherly-women. Edna’s second awakening occurs when she pushes the bounds of her immortality by swimming out farther than she thought that she could, but still makes it back to shore. This leads her to try new thing even to the point of speaking back to her husband. To speak…
Edna’s suicide was a happy ending for her alone. She came to the realization that she couldn’t remain awakened and live in a world filled with moral conventions and responsibilities. Her death reconciled her life with freedom.…
Student paper (p. 3): The Awakening is about the story of a young wife who is awakened to her sexual needs that cannot be fulfilled within the confines of her conventional marriage (Clark, 2008). Nevertheless, Edna Pontellier is awakened to a yearning for freedom, a relation to and understanding of herself that she has not been aware of missing in the past. In the text, Edna identifies with the masculine interest of her father who the narrator remarks had managed or coerced his wife into her early grave. However, when Edna is awakened to the hidden potentialities she possesses, it is the yearning for freedom and the desire to overcome the limitations imposed on her from outside that determine her actions.…
In 19th century Louisiana, there was a gender role for men and women. The men went to work while the women were “mother wives” whose main job was to to care of the children and help the family. This way of life was predominantly unquestioned, except in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. In The Awakening, Edna Pontellier, a wealthy “mother wife”, tries to fight her gender role and become independent. Edna Pontellier’s strive for independence leads to struggles with the society’s gender role upon women.…
and it ultimately helps Edna to decide what she wants to do with her life.…
Edna is realizing her position as a human being and recognizes her relations with others in the world. She is having an individual self-discovery or sexual desire and her intellectual pursuits.…
One of the main struggles of a woman’s role she faces is over motherhood. Edna loves her children, however, she wants to find her identity and she feels her children hold her back. Even her children do not view her as nurturing,…
During their talk in chapter 7, Edna also tells Adele something about her feelings for her children. Edna loves her children but feels weighed down with a responsibility that is suited to her nature. She feels relief when they are away. Edna is not a “mother-woman” like the women that surround her on the island, and their children, when they fall over and hurt themselves, do not rush to her as other women's children do, but they merely pick themselves up and carry on playing. Although Mr. Pontellier is therefore not able to point the finger towards any definite dereliction of duty as a mother, the way that Edna is obviously so different from the other mothers with them that summer highlights that she has a very different kind of relationship…
The first man that Edna comes in contact with in the novel is her Husband, Mr. Pontellier. The author uses this father and husband figure to create the sense of commitment that comes from love, but nothing else, revealing to Edna the need for more than just commitment. The author creates this sense of commitment on page 7 of “The Awakening” by having Edna be called the “sole object of his existence.”…
The protagonist attends a party and hears emotional piano music from Mademoiselle Reisz, a woman who becomes detached from society to follow her passion for music. This inspires the young woman to follow her own dreams. Reisz, in turn, guides Edna by assisting her pursuit for true love while warning her of the conflicts that this path brings. Reisz aids Edna with her worries by permitting her to read the letters from Robert Lebrun, the man who awakens Edna with their forbidden love before moving to Mexico. This helps Edna to continue her journey in her awakening, as the narrator states, “Edna was sobbing, just as she had wept one midnight at Grand Isle when strange, new voices awoke in her” (Chapter 21). Another key point is when Reisz alerts Edna of the forthcoming struggles she will face. The musician assures Edna of the consequences to the path of liberty, testifying that, “The artist must possess the courageous soul, the soul that dares and defies” (Chapter…
As Edna neglects her social reputation and duties by having affairs, she seems to become an independent woman whose power is guided by love, but she soon crashes through this dream as reality kicks in that she still has a family that she must take care of and expectations to reach. Robert realizes this, which is why he leaves, but seeing her lover float away, Edna loses her fight for control and thus decides to take her own life, sadly much like how many other people in society decide to deal with their problems. If one is going to fight for control and rebel against expectations, he or she must be prepared for the…
Edna faces this struggle with her husband, Mr. Pontellier because she feels like he controls her. After her first awakening experience, Edna’s husband demands that she come inside and go to bed and it is noted that, “She wondered if her husband had ever spoken to her like that before, and if she had submitted to his command. Of course she had; she remembered that she had. But she could not realize why or how she should have yielded, feeling as she then did.” This realization that her husband used to control her and Edna’s refusal to continue obeying him demarks the first steps she takes toward taking control of her own life. The second prominent example of blatant disregard for her husband’s wishes is when Edna moves into her own house. No longer wishing to live in her husband’s house, she moves to her own as the narrator points out, “The pigeon-house pleased her. It at once assumed the intimate character of a home, while she herself invested it with a charm… Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual.” This validates Edna’s desire to be free from her former life and highlights the fact that she is only able to truly flourish when she is on her own. Sadly, one must be willing to give up relationships in order to fully achieve this sense of…
the main character, Edna Pontellier. She argues the basic conflict of how Edna experiences the tension of sexual initiation while struggling for self-assertion and identity. In my research paper I will use this source to represent how The Awakening shows the theme of oppression of self-identity. I will incorporate this source as one of my examples for analyzing the theme of oppression of self-identity.…