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Analysis Of Edna Pontellier's The Awakening

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Social expectations have haunted people across the timeline, however, have changed as life has progressed. Today, women specifically may be labeled by their body size or the way they speak, being cast out of society and even being subjected to physical and/or emotional abuse. On the contrary, in the nineteenth century women faced harsh discrimination by white men that objectified them and forced them to submit to their husbands and tend to their every need. Today, women would never face to live in such an animalistic way, however many found themselves fulfilling the role without protest and enjoying the simplicity of such a life back in the 1800s. Edna Pontellier, however, refused to be one of these obedient women, deciding to instead …show more content…

The sea was her freedom, her escape from the Edna who submitted for the role of an endearing wife as she finds purchase on her true identity. At the end of the story, Edna once again finds herself next to the sea in search of strength and peace. She felt “like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known” (Chopin 189). The sea allows her to be free, to see the world in the way it was supposed to appear rather than the way society wants it to be seen. She wanted to love who she wanted to love, do as she wanted to do, paint when she wanted to paint, live a life of independence and peaceful freedom where the real her was expressed. Chopin in no way withholds her literary talent as she incorporates such a powerful symbol into her story, expressing Edna’s journey in finding herself and what she stood for in a powerful and successful manner. In the end, Chopin had Edna end her life in the place where it truly began, the sea, to express the penultimate act in discovering herself.. The powerful symbol of freedom and escape represented Edna finding peace and rest in eternal freedom. In addition to the incorporation of symbolism, Kate Chopin writes the story of Edna Pontellier with descriptive, sensory imagery that significantly follows her path of discovery. Throughout the entirety of the text, Edna finds herself beginning to long for Mademoiselle Reisz’s

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