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The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Thesis Statement

“The Awakening beautifully illustrates a variety of feminist concerns: the clash between individual freedom and social duty”.

Introduction

Author of the early feminist novel The Awakening, Kate Chopin created works that showcased the Louisiana bayou country and often featured women struggling against society's restrictions. The Awakening became Chopin's major literary achievement; it was also far in advance of its time. One of the earliest American novels to question marriage as an institution, Edna's discontent and her various attempts to find fulfillment caused a scandal. The novel was attacked as immoral and as unfit for reading. Critics praised the beauty and power of the novel's style and setting, its careful pacing, and its subtly drawn characters, but many questioned Edna's (and Chopin's) morality. Like Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, The Awakening is realistic portrayal of a woman's desire to find her identity outraged many (Streater, pp.406-416).

"The Awakening" is fascinated by the transformation of the main character - you can see how Edna is gradually maturing, evolves, comes to life, first timidly, hesitantly, then more boldly and more enthusiastic, almost on the border of a sinister desperation. But I did not give the heroine euphoria, but rather I followed her fate with some disbelief, but wished her the best. The novel is written in a very subtle, mild language.

Discussion

The Story

The Pontelliers, residents of New Orleans, are vacationing at Grand Isle, a resort in the Gulf of Mexico. The Lebrun and Ratignolle families, also Creoles of New Orleans, are companions of Edna, who is unhappy with the limited role dictated to her by her husband Léonce. Madame Lebrun's caged parrot symbolizes Edna's feeling of being trapped in a loveless marriage and in an economically oriented social system in which women are only wives and mothers. Her husband expects her to be like Adèle Ratignolle, who exemplifies the type of submissive and sacrificial wife that Léonce expects and thinks he deserves. Edna, however, is not willing to submit to such traditions or to sacrifice herself for the sake of her husband and their two sons (Jones, pp. 1-3).

When Léonce notices that Edna was sunburned after spending a time on the beach with Robert Lebrun, his main concern is that a “valuable piece of personal property suffered some damage.” In contrast to her husband's business-based value system, Robert offers her companionship and sympathy. She talks to him of her girlhood in Kentucky. Meanwhile, Léonce complains about her “habitual neglect of the children.” Edna realizes that she can never be a good mother like Adèle if it means stifling her independence. “A certain light was beginning to dawn” in Edna that nurtures her dissatisfaction with her life and leads her to recognize that her marriage to the forty-year-old businessman (twelve years her senior) is a mistake. She was flattered by Léonce's devotion to her, but the violent opposition to the marriage by her father and her sister Margaret (because Léonce was a Catholic) may have been Edna's prime motive in marrying. Léonce belongs to another culture, a French American society quite different from the strict Presbyterian environment of ...