Awakening Essay - 2422 Words

When Kate Chopins The Awakening was published at the end of the 19th Century, many reviewers took issue with what they perceived to be the authors defiance of Victorian proprieties, but it is this very defiance with which has been responsible for the revival in the interest of the novel today. This factor is borne out by Chopins own words throughout her Preface -- where she indicates that women were not recipients of equal treatment. (Chopin, Preface ) Edna takes her own life at the books end, not because of remorse over having committed adultery but because she can no longer struggle against the social conventions which deny her fulfillment as a person and as a woman. Like Kate Chopin herself, Edna is an artist and a woman of†¦show more content†¦When Edna finally resolved to end her life it is not because she has been rejected by Robert but because she can no longer lead the type authentic life which to her is the only life worth living, and this is the result of the denia l of equal rights to women by the society of that day. Chopin has clearly taken care to anticipate criticisms that her suicide would leave the children motherless by having her recently visit the children to find that they really had no need of her and are perfectly content with the grandmother. In having Edna reflect that she would never sacrifice herself for her children, Chopin was not arguing so much in defense of selfish- ness as against the view that a mother could be expected to deny her own freedom for the sake the children in a manner that was not expected of the father. Thus, womens struggle is synonymous with Ednas suicide as well as the events leading up to it. Edna plays a significant role in this story. Overall, I personally construed K. Chopins novel as a repudiation of prevailing mores which govern womens behavior during that period in time. Edna was an outsider. She did not comprehend that the personal freedoms she saw all about her were well defined within a construct of old established social conventions,Show MoreRelatedThe Awakening on Kate Chopins The Awakening1745 Words   |  7 Pages The time period of the 1880s that Kate Chopin lived in influenced her to write The Awakening, a very controversial book because of many new depictions of women introduced in the book. The Awakening is a book about a woman, Edna Pontellier. In the beginning, she is a happy woman with her husband and 2 kids vacationing at Grand Isle. While there, Edna realizes she is in love with Robert Lebrun and that she was just forced into an unloving/dissatisfying marriage with Mr. Pontellier. Robert howeverRead MoreDemoralization In The Awakening1584 Words   |  7 Pagesthem and cause them to lose hope. Kate Chopin uses words like â€Å"depressed† (56), â€Å"hopeless† (56) and â€Å"despondency† (p115) to describe Edna, the heroine, in The Awakening. Coupling this description with Edna taking her life at the end of the novel and Chopin’s own inferred demoralization, due to the almost universal aversion to The Awakening, the natural conclusion is that it is a work of â€Å"great personal demoralization†, (Companion 5) as Michael Levenson states. Levenson suggests most modernist authorsRead MoreFeminism In The Awakening1562 Words   |  7 Pagesprivileges as each other. Basic human rights would give others the notion that this is how all humans should have been treated from the beginning. However, this is far from the truth. Books like The Awakening, give us an inside look at how women were treated around 100 years ago. 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Dr. Malcolm Sayer, who is a research physician, is confronted with a number of patients who had each been afflicted with a devastating disease called Encephalitis Lethargica. The illness killed most of the people who contracted it, but some were left living