In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Edna Pontellier, the protagonist, struggles to find her identity as a woman in a society that emphasizes very little on a woman’s role. Edna encounters not only her own personal boundaries with her two small sons and finding where her priorities lie concerning them but her society’s ideals of a true Victorian mother and woman and all that role encompasses. Victorian society in New Orleans at the time believed that the role of a woman should be restricted simply to
revolution. (Walder, p.257) Paradoxically, Edna’s awakening is cumulative and complex as she experiences a powerful, emotional and physical awakening and becomes enlightened to her inner-self. The omniscient narrator describes the process as “Mrs Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the world as a human being, and to recognise her relations as an individual to the world within and about her.” (Chopin, p.16) Peculiarly, Edna’s sexual awakening is comparable to animals in that her sexual impulses
Now considered classic among similarly didactic works is Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. Written in 1899, it holds a strong social message considering the liberation of women - particularly in a romantic, social and even sexual sense. Just as strong, and quite necessary for this social message is a well crafted work of literature. For, as we’ll come to see, Chopin’s commentary is not only dependent on, but is also completely intertwined with, various literary elements. To start, the beginning of Edna’s
Edna Pontellier is on vacation in Grand Isle near New Orleans in the novella The Awakening by Kate Chopin, but she was raised on a farm setting in Kentucky. Edna’s childhood memories reveal to the reader her current interest in independence when the thing that reminds her of her childhood is the “sight of the water stretching so far away… made a delicious picture that [she] just wanted to sit and look at” (24). The yearning diction of “delicious” and “wanted” indicate Edna’s pleasure and desire with