The Awakening Essay Research Paper The novel

The Awakening Essay, Research Paper

The novel, The Awakening, by Kate Chopin is set in the late nineteenth century, in

Louisiana. This is a place and time for women to submit themselves to the wants and

needs of husbands and families. The protagonist, Edna Pontellier, isn t content with being

a mother-woman, one of the ordinary, traditional women who, “…idolized their children,

worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it to a holy privilege to efface themselves as

individuals and grow wings as ministering angels”( Chopin 51). Edna wanted more, and

as there were very few women at this time leading the way to break these sorts of glass

ceilings, Edna looked for women within her life to model herself after.

Adele Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz, two women who also engage in art,

serve as Edna Pontellier s options, they represent what society views as the suitable and

unsuitable woman figures. Mademoiselle Ratignolle is the ideal Grand Isle woman, a

home-loving mother and a good wife, and Mademoiselle Reisz as the old, unmarried,

childless, musician who devoted her life to music, rather than a man. Feeling that neither

of their lifestyles were suitable and lacking the ability to create a model of her own, Edna

in the closing of The Awakening commits suicide by walking into the ocean. Perhaps if

there had been a more well rounded woman figure in Edna s life, she wouldn t have felt

the life she craved was, …an undefined, unexpressed, ineffable life that she cannot

articulate or shape (Spangler). In witnessing other women achieve the articulation of a

complexly spirited life, she may have found a new life easier to attain.

Adele serves as the perfect “mother-woman” in The Awakening, being both

married and pregnant, but Edna does not follow Adele s footsteps. For Edna, Adele

appears unable to perceive herself as an individual human being. She possesses no sense of

herself beyond her role as wife and mother, and therefore Adele exists only in relation to

her family, not in relation to herself or the world. Edna respects art, but does not respect

Adele s reasoning for playing the piano, She was keeping up her music on account of the

children, she said: because she and her husband both considered it a means of brightening

the home and making it attractive (Chopin 69). Regardless of whether Adele actually

feels this way about her art or whether she only uses it to rationalize, it is still a maternal

project in Edna s eyes that will only thrust her further into the role she rejects, Women s

art, as Adele presents it, is social, pleasant, and undemanding. It does not conflict with

her duties as a wife and mother (Showalter 74). Edna being against the mother-woman

image is obviously turned off by this notion.

A woman who Edna does believe to play the piano for the right reasons is

Mademoiselle Reisz, the other female model. Despite Reisz s eccentricities, Edna is

completely mesmerized by her ability to live and to play, maybe her ability to live to play.

When the characters are still vacationing at Grande Isle nearer to the opening of the book,

Edna wishes to hear Mademoiselle Reisz play and Robert calls on her. After explaining

that Edna would often listen to Reisz practice as she imagined corresponding stories to

each song, it is explained that on this particular day, listening to Reisz play this particular

song, Edna had an awakening reaction, It was not the first time she had heard an artist

play the piano. Perhaps it was the first time she was ready, perhaps the first time her being

was ready to take an impress of the abiding truth (71). Because Reisz s music evoked

this out pouring of feelings in Edna, there is a special bond between the two women.

This bond grows and strengthens throughout the course of their relationship.

Edna, although sometimes confused by her conversations with Reisz, also finds

strength. She explains to Alcee Arobin how Reisz sometimes makes her feel, She says

queer things sometimes in a bantering way that you don t notice at the time and you find

yourself thinking about afterward (Chopin 138). She is referring to her conversation with

Reisz just prior to her meeting Arobin, but her statement to applies to all of her meetings

with Reisz. Reisz explains to Edna such things as the strength it takes to be an artist, the

strength it takes to be a successful person, Reisz postulates both the determinism of

nature and existential freedom when she tells Edna that to be an artist requires, absolute

gifts and a soul that dares and defies (Hollister 91). Edna is so intrigued by Reisz s

ability to project such a specific idea of how to achieve not only because it is a first for

Edna but also because Reisz sometimes come off more mysterious as she often uses

metaphors.

Mademoiselle Reisz s the opposite of a mother-woman . Although Reisz typifies

an individual woman who can be likened to Edna through the love of art, there

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