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A Summary Of The Awakening Conscience

Decent Essays

Aristotle considered the heart’s passive voice the source of thought, reason, and emotion. He thought this due to the speeding up and slowing down of the beating heart. The physical manifestation of emotion, the heart, begins to flutter when one’s love draws near; however, once joined with the person’s love, the owner of the heart loses independence and identity. Hunt, Atwood, and Chopin focus on the vast negative sacrifices one must make while in a relationship with a significant other: one’s identity, loss of opportunities due to relationship conformity, and potentially irreversible destruction to the heart.
Being with a significant other will strip one’s individualism causing one to yearn for one’s lost character and identity. …show more content…

The loss of one’s identity will cause lost opportunities to pursue one’s happiness. In the Awakening Conscience, Hunt paints the woman looking through a window with a green garden. Hunt emanates the idea that the man stopped her from pursuing her opportunity in order to conform to the relationship. The woman hopes for new beginnings of a utopic paradise and strives for new beginnings to escape the unhappy present. In “The Woman Who Could Not Live with Her Faulty Heart,” Atwood compares the heart’s living space to “deep oceans of no light” (line 14). Atwood connects darkness to the woman’s significant other’s shadow blocking the light. Atwood expresses that the woman’s significant other is preventing any hope for the woman to obtain her opportunities. Hunt and Atwood contend the obligations of being in a relationship that will cause one to lose their opportunities.
The heart, a fragile organ, will endure irreparable damage from the hardships of a relationship. In “The Woman Who Could Not Live with Her Faulty Heart,” Atwood compares the heart to an “unshelled turtle” and is enduring a “regular struggle against being drowned” (lines 10, 11, and 19). Atwood uses vivid imagery to illustrate that the heart is fragile and easily broken. The author, also, conveys to the reader that the heart, always in a constant struggle, must overcome various obstacles. In “The Story of An Hour,” Chopin states “[Ms.

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