Symbolism In The Awakening
Swimming the Sea to Symbolism
To some people swimming is a form of exercise, some may use swimming as a type of stress reliever, and to others it may just be something to do for fun. To Edna Pontellier, it’s a form of awakening, and becoming who she is meant to be. Throughout The Awakening by Kate Chopin, much of a deeper meaning in the story is revealed though a number of important symbols. The symbolic element of swimming and the sea make the connection between Edna’s world and her eventual awakening more vivid and meaningful for the reader. The sea and swimming symbolize freedom and metaphorical death.
Throughout the novel, swimming and the sea symbolize Edna’s longing to be free from society’s expectations of her to be a perfect …show more content…
mother and caring wife. When Edna is around those expectations, she feels stressed and suppressed, but when she is around the water, she feels calm, cool, and collective. The sea is where Edna feels like she can be the person she wants to be, and not who society wants her to be. This becomes very evident in the novel when Edna learns to swim on her own, “A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given to control the working of her body and her soul” (47). That short passage reveals how the sea motivates Edna to be different from what society wants. When Edna is swimming in the sea, she doesn’t feel like a mother or wife anymore, she feels like she is getting away from the social expectations of society. In this time period, most women just went along with the expectations set on them; they put their children before anything, and they listened to exactly what their husbands had to say. Because of the sea, Edna has found what it feels like to not conform to society’s expectations; she’s felt what it’s like to be completely free and independent.
The sea and swimming are very important symbols in The Awakening, which Chopin uses to show familiar effects.
In Chapter VI, as Edna begins to “awaken” to her position in her world, Chopin juxtaposes a comment about the “voice of the sea” with a paragraph describing the beginnings of a new world, “But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!” (25) Chopin didn’t accidentally set Edna’s awakening on the resort of Grand Isle and in the city of New Orleans where the sea is always close at hand. Even as Chopin alludes to the chaotic nature of the sea, she also draws attention to the sea as a source of life and new birth. Edna’s eventual mastery of swimming offers the point that she swims with “newly conquered power” toward “the unlimited in which to lose herself.” The sea has opened up a new expanse of exploration for Edna; an expanse in which ironically, Edna’s “loss” of herself really mars the “gaining” of herself. Throughout the novel, the sea is almost a character in itself; Chopin makes many references to its “voice”, which calls to, and even seduces Edna into her newly “awakened” life. “The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.”
(25).
By the end of the story, of course, Edna has succumbed to, or more positively, has fully answered this wild call to self-discovery and actualization voiced by the sea. As Edna begins her final walk into the gulf, the sea represents new birth, as Edna enters the waters “naked in the open air,” as vulnerable as a newborn infant. Indeed, Edna herself feels “like some newborn creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known” (189). Further, Edna “regresses” to her adolescence and childhood the further she goes into the ocean; she recalls “oceans” of Kentucky bluegrass in which she grew up, “oceans” that represented a time when she was truer to herself than she became in later, married, domesticated, conventional life. Thus, the sea stands for freedom, even as Edna is; for fullest thematic impact, the text itself does not specify drowning in it. The sea is both life and death; indeed, there can be no “real” life for Edna without the death of her old “life.”
Through the symbolism of the swimming and the sea as a freedom, life, new beginning and finality, Chopin creates a work of art that greatly impacts the readers. Edna is experiencing a “fall” into her death in the sea; a much needed, long overdue “fall” from ignorance into knowledge, from immaturity into maturity, and from slavery into freedom. The readers understand swimming and the sea’s crucial role in the story, and even Edna herself, perceives swimming and the sea’s symbolic place in her life. The sea and swimming both symbolically and physically form the most important components of each story: the beginning, the end and everything in between.
To some people swimming is a form of exercise, some may use swimming as a type of stress reliever, and to others it may just be something to do for fun. To Edna Pontellier, it’s a form of awakening, and becoming who she is meant to be. Throughout The Awakening by Kate Chopin, much of a deeper meaning in the story is revealed though a number of important symbols. The symbolic element of swimming and the sea make the connection between Edna’s world and her eventual awakening more vivid and meaningful for the reader. The sea and swimming symbolize freedom and metaphorical death.
Throughout the novel, swimming and the sea symbolize Edna’s longing to be free from society’s expectations of her to be a perfect …show more content…
mother and caring wife. When Edna is around those expectations, she feels stressed and suppressed, but when she is around the water, she feels calm, cool, and collective. The sea is where Edna feels like she can be the person she wants to be, and not who society wants her to be. This becomes very evident in the novel when Edna learns to swim on her own, “A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given to control the working of her body and her soul” (47). That short passage reveals how the sea motivates Edna to be different from what society wants. When Edna is swimming in the sea, she doesn’t feel like a mother or wife anymore, she feels like she is getting away from the social expectations of society. In this time period, most women just went along with the expectations set on them; they put their children before anything, and they listened to exactly what their husbands had to say. Because of the sea, Edna has found what it feels like to not conform to society’s expectations; she’s felt what it’s like to be completely free and independent.
The sea and swimming are very important symbols in The Awakening, which Chopin uses to show familiar effects.
In Chapter VI, as Edna begins to “awaken” to her position in her world, Chopin juxtaposes a comment about the “voice of the sea” with a paragraph describing the beginnings of a new world, “But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!” (25) Chopin didn’t accidentally set Edna’s awakening on the resort of Grand Isle and in the city of New Orleans where the sea is always close at hand. Even as Chopin alludes to the chaotic nature of the sea, she also draws attention to the sea as a source of life and new birth. Edna’s eventual mastery of swimming offers the point that she swims with “newly conquered power” toward “the unlimited in which to lose herself.” The sea has opened up a new expanse of exploration for Edna; an expanse in which ironically, Edna’s “loss” of herself really mars the “gaining” of herself. Throughout the novel, the sea is almost a character in itself; Chopin makes many references to its “voice”, which calls to, and even seduces Edna into her newly “awakened” life. “The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.”
(25).
By the end of the story, of course, Edna has succumbed to, or more positively, has fully answered this wild call to self-discovery and actualization voiced by the sea. As Edna begins her final walk into the gulf, the sea represents new birth, as Edna enters the waters “naked in the open air,” as vulnerable as a newborn infant. Indeed, Edna herself feels “like some newborn creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known” (189). Further, Edna “regresses” to her adolescence and childhood the further she goes into the ocean; she recalls “oceans” of Kentucky bluegrass in which she grew up, “oceans” that represented a time when she was truer to herself than she became in later, married, domesticated, conventional life. Thus, the sea stands for freedom, even as Edna is; for fullest thematic impact, the text itself does not specify drowning in it. The sea is both life and death; indeed, there can be no “real” life for Edna without the death of her old “life.”
Through the symbolism of the swimming and the sea as a freedom, life, new beginning and finality, Chopin creates a work of art that greatly impacts the readers. Edna is experiencing a “fall” into her death in the sea; a much needed, long overdue “fall” from ignorance into knowledge, from immaturity into maturity, and from slavery into freedom. The readers understand swimming and the sea’s crucial role in the story, and even Edna herself, perceives swimming and the sea’s symbolic place in her life. The sea and swimming both symbolically and physically form the most important components of each story: the beginning, the end and everything in between.