The Awakening is set in New Orleans at the end of the Victorian era. The significance of the novel being set in the Victorian era is the way women are treated and looked at. For a typical Victorian woman, she was expected to be faithful and do what the husband desires, take care of the children, and basically be entertainment for man. If affects the novel because the main character will go through awakenings that will challenge this social norm. Point of View and the Significances The point of view of The Awakening is third person omniscient that looks over mostly at Edna Pontellier.
This gives more of an insight into the life and thoughts of Edna, while at the same time not encouraging a bias toward a character and allowing for the reader to develop individual preferences. Major Characters There are a couple of major characters in the Awakening: Edna Pontellier is the main character of the novel, meaning she is the protagonist. Edna is a woman with two children, married to a Leonce Pontellier. Though she complied with society most of her life, she has always felt empty. She loves her husband but is not in love with him. She realizes her oppression and want for freedom when she learns to swim.
Her thoughts on love and sex are two un-related things. Leonce Pontellier is the ideal man of the Victorian Era. His view of women is that they are man’s possessions. He tends to think of his reputation instead of Edna’s wellbeing.
His is an antagonist throughout the novel, and is also a static character. Robert Lebrun is the son of the owners of the Grand Isle resort. He and Edna develop a romance in which he knows will not workout. Although he greatly cares for her “He cannot bring himself to join her in rebellion”(Bogarad 5) Adele Ratignolle is the complete opposite of Edna.
She is the average Victorian women.She is subservient, has children “at regular intervals”(Green 3), and puts family before everything, including herself. Edna feels pity for her. Alcee Arobin is Edna’s lover later in the novel.
Alcee becomes infatuated with greatly with Edna, though Edna only uses him for pleasure. He helps Edna develop her love separate from sex belief. Mademoiselle Reisz is much like Edna. She lives alone and independent. Mademoiselle tells Edna that she needs “strong wings” in order to soar “above the level plain of tradition and prejudice”(Chopin ch. 27) Society, though it is not one character, plays an important role in the novel.
Society is an antagonist, because it continually keeps Edna down eventually to the point where she has to kill herself trying to escape society and its grasp. Plot Synopsis In the Awakening, Edna Pontellier, wife of Leonce Pontellier and woman in the edge of her prime, finds love and “the feminine dilemma” of Victorian society(Bogarad 1). After her realization she rebels against the norm and encounters disaster. Major Symbols The sea is major symbol that can mean a couple of things like freedom and rebirth. The inability to swim showed Edna’s oppression in her society.
When she learned how to swim the sea became her playground and she became free. She swims to a point “where no woman had swum,” which shows how she has gained freedom. The sea is also seen as a rebirth. When she gets naked and goes into the sea, at the end of the novel, she feels like she is being cleansed. This cleansing can be associated to a rebirth in where her death shall usher in a new life, if connected to a reincarnation idea. A refrain beginning “’The voice of the sea is seductive, vever ceasing, clamoring, murmuring,…’ is used throughout the novel.
”(Eble 3) The bird is also a major symbol in the novel.It represents Edna throughout. In the beginning there was a caged parrot that spoke a language that no one understood. That bird can be connected to Edna in two ways, one being Edna is caged inside the confines of society and how no one can understand Edna’s plight. As the novel progresses, Edna is able to escape from the hands of Leonce Pontellier, and she moves into a small house down the street in which she calls the pigeon house. The symbol of the bird is used here by saying she may be able to release herself from Leonce but she isn’t able to release herself from society, that she if forever trapped.
In the end of the novel, before Edna’s tragedy, a bird with a broken wing crashes into the sea. This bird can be connected with the advice that Mademoiselle Reisz told Edna that she needed strong wings to soar. The connection for shadows Edna’s tragedy, and reveals her complete failure to find complete freedom and happiness. Themes a) One cannot escape society’s grasp Throughout the novel, the bird is continually used to connect Edna’s status.
In the beginning the caged bird shows that Edna is trapped by the cage of society. She eventually moves out of Mr. Pontellier’s house, yet moves into the pigeon house.She is still trapped under the grasp of society. b) True love and attaining it is only a fantasy When Edna receives gifts from Mr.
Pontellier she is forced to realize that she loves him, yet what she also realizes is that she truly does not love him. In her romance with Robert, she feels great affection and love for him. He as well feels that same for her, yet he cannot corrupt the union of marriage by being with Edna so he decides to leave and not further the relationship. Edna’s inability to attain Robert devastates her to a point of no return, in which she decides to drown herself.In the end she never attains her love supporting the theme that true love and attaining is only fantasy.
Summary and Evaluation The Awakening: a Refusal to Compromise Kate Chopin’s The Awakening shows the heroine’s sexual initiation in a battle for self-assertion and herself. As a negative part of her growth, the main character—most likely an artist—becomes alienated from traditions required by society and is unable to fulfill her desire to interact with others and to get to her need for artistry. As almost always, when a man writes a novel, the hero chooses an apostasy in which the male gets both his desires.Although when a woman writes a novel it usually involves the same situation, yet ending in their disaster.
This difference shows the roles of the genders in this society. Kate Chopin put the setting of the Awakening in the New Orleans Creole Society at the end of the century. Chopin has had much criticism as saying that Edna is a woman that had a romantic illusion that in the end spun her sins brought her to utter demise. Chopin was forces to deny her pride in her character Edna, yet it is easily seen that she intended to make a her a courageous woman that wanted companionship and liberty.Edna has a double Awakening.
First one is she wants to be free, although she wants to have a union with a companion that would provide emotional connection and intimacy, and would help her achieve her freedom. This first awakening becomes a knowing of her conflict as wife and mother, and her emergence of independence. She endures a second awakening at the pigeon house that concludes with despair and death. In the beginning her rejection of marriage seems to free her but her candidates for new love aren’t a change from what she was willing to reject.Edna seems free from her decision as an artist, yet she realizes she cannot be sexual and successful.
She realizes she has to be “either-or”: “angel or whore? ” She sees that she has to pick between an being an artist but isolated or conform with companion. In the end, she commits suicide due to her inability to compromise. Her first awakening is a Grand Isle she has been married and has children, something that males don’t go through to in achieving self-determination. After Adele touches Edna, she opens up completely. Her first awakening is made up of two, rebirth and openness.Adele, although opposite of what Edna wants, she becomes a contrast and catalyst for her self-realization by understanding her, yet not encouraging her.
The sea, like the bird/flying, is a symbol. Critics corrupt our view of Edna’s awakening by focusing on her sexuality and not on her effort to become her own person. She find that she sends affection to Robert and her returns it, yet Robert, being creole, cannot risk breaking social code. He is not courageous and Edna is.
Edna becomes sexually aware when she refuses to lay with her husband, and she becomes economically independent with her art.Like Mlle. Reisz, if Edna chooses art, she will have to completely commit to it and have to buy into the negative price like the malicious tags. Adele is the complete opposite of her.
She represents what a woman should do. Edna sees that love and sex can be separate, yet when she kisses Arobin she also sees that it cannot be emotionally satisfying. She keeps searching for ways to express herself. When she moves out and has a party with colours of red and gold, to represent sensuality, it foreshadows the final demise by ending the party in disaster.She feels isolated, a feeling not expected from her party.
Her second awakening begins there. She likes the company of Arobin. She discovers that is no way to separate what the body does from what the mind or heart is feeling without making a self-corruption. She is split in by Alcee and Robert being a whore or an angel.
Edna cannot compromise with complete isolation. When Robert returns, it brings hope for Edna. He loves and wants Edna, but he cannot bring himself to join her in rebellion against the sacrament of marriage. He does not understand her want for independence.She realizes and her second awaking is complete. When Edna concedes to herself that she cannot achieve either autonomy or connection with others, she surrenders and stops struggling.
In the end she is completely alone and no one understands her. She returns to the womb-like embrace of the sea. What were her choices? She could have gone into the overwhelming life of Adele or the isolated, alone life of Mlle. Reisz. In male novels the hero is expected to go for what he wanted in the first place, yet in female novels the hero is supposed to go back into marriage and motherhood.Edna chose neither.
In the critical essay by Carley Rees Bogarad, points are made that would suggest that Edna had two awakenings, one being her realization to wants “autonomy as a human being”(bogarad 1) and the other one being her she cannot be an autonomous and have a union. Another point would be that Edna’s search for middle ground with companionship and freedom was a failure. Both points I agree with except for the location of the first awakening. Bogarad also states how the critics mostly focus on the sexual experiences of Edna instead of her journey to self-realization.I have to disagree with her because Edna is perceived greatly as a “whore” in the novel, though maybe unattended.
Edna Pontellier has complied with the societal norm of the Victorian Era, being married for ten years and having children, yet with her first awakening she begins her path to self-realization. As stated by Bogarad, the first awakening was achieved in two places being one with Adele and opening up, and the other one being with Mlle. Reisz and Edna’s emotional release. I disagree with the positioning of the first awakening.
The right place to have set the first awakening would have been at the beach with Edna learning how to swim.There she experienced a two fold in her awakening. Edna being unable to swim, signified her inability to be independent and confined land, or society. With her learning how to swim and going where no woman had swum, she realized she wants freedom. She also became open emotionally and sexually. Due to her want for freedom and autonomy she moved out from her house and became economically sufficient with her paintings.
Mlle. Reisz and Adele serve as contrast both showing the only paths in which Edna can take, although she want to find middle ground with autonomy and companionship.They help Edna with progress to her second awakening. At the party in which Edna hosts at her “pigeon house,” the guest don’t get along well and instead of Edna feeling strengthened and happy “she feels alienated and alone”(Bogarad 4). This is where Bogarad states that her second awakening starts, in which that I agree with. Edna awakens to realize that she cannot be autonomous and have companionship at the same time.
She would have to pick being oppressed again yet with a companion like Robert, or to be an independent artist but face the same isolation and criticism that plagues Mlle. Reisz. Edna cannot accept the fact that her great desire for autonomy would come at isolation being the price. “She has chosen not to live for others, but she refuses to choose to live without others”(Bogarad 4). Isolation is something that she refuses to compromise on.
In the end, her realization that she cannot have freedom and union together leaves her with the only choice but to choose neither and kill herself. It is said that Edna’s suicide was a successful depiction of her ability to “take control of her destiny”(Green 3).Though is as Bogarad and I disagree. Edna’s inability to fulfill her desire of becoming autonomous and in companionship lead her to giving up and drowning herself.
It can be seen that she may have ultimately challenged societal norm by killing herself, something that even today isn’t accepted, but in this case it was her ability, or inability, to fulfill the autonomous/union desire. She cannot achieve self-fulfillment in her mortal life. Bogarad states that Edna is criticized mostly by her sexual experiences and not on her journey to self-realization. I disagree on that statement. I believe that Edna is criticized evenly throughout.
Negative action shall always shine brighter than the positive ones and that is what we see. Edna is a criticized mostly as a whore for a couple of reasons. She leaves her husband to get involved in a romance with Robert Lebrun. That is one thing that is perceived as infidelity, yet she doesn’t just stop there. With the absence of Robert, him being in Mexico, she involves herself with the womanizing Alcee, constantly having sexual affairs.
Her self-realization could have gone without much of that. Chopin went too far to try and depict an attempt at feministic independence by giving Edna that promiscuous characteristic.
