Deadly Awakening Quotes

She leaves the care of her children to her grandmother, abandoning them and her husband when she leaves to live in the pigeon-house. To her, leaving her old home with Léonce is very important to her freedom. Almost everything in their house belonged to him, so even if he were to leave, she would still feel surrounded by his possessions. She never fully becomes free of him until she physically leaves the house. That way, Edna has no ties whatsoever to that man. Furthermore, Edna indulges in more humanistic things such as art and music. She listens to Mademoiselle Reisz’s playing of the piano and feels the music resonate throughout her body and soul, and uses it as a form of escapism from the world. Based on these instances, Edna acts almost like a very young child, completely disregarding consequences and thinking only about what they want to do experience most at that moment. However, to the reader this does not necessarily appear “bad”, but rather it is seen from the perspective of a person who has been controlled by others their entire life and wishes to break free from their grasp. In a way, she is enacting a childlike and subconscious form of revenge by disobeying all known social constructs of how a woman should talk, walk, act, and interact with others.

Throughout the novel The Awakening by Kate Chopin, the main character, Edna Pontellier travels through her journey of finding herself. However, her friend, Adéle Ratignolle is one of the most influential characters on Edna’s awakening. A complete foil to Edna’s open-mindedness, Madame Ratignolle is a woman who is devoted to her family, conventional and set-in-her-ways, and candid. Though she remains a static character throughout the story, these traits make her an interesting character with a hidden, but deep impact on the plot.

Edna had to come to terms with her personal transformation by comprehending the layers of her subconscious. Only then would she be able to realize who she truly was and what she desired as an individual. Before she started realizing what was occurring and what she was truly feeling, she let herself be guided by others and their aspirations. “She was blindly following whatever impulse moved her, as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of

Whether coerced or through self realizations, there were many awakenings in the book. The first was that Edna was not the traditional mother like Adèle, the second was that she enjoyed doing things for herself instead of for her children and husband. This second awakening is shown when Edna takes time to talk

Her feelings are frequently revealed but the narrator persists to remind readers they are in fact, Edna’s feelings, and not those of the narrator. It is possible that this form of narration is used in order to cleverly reinforces the alienation of Edna Pontellier from her society, as while readers gain access to her thoughts and emotions – which are very personal, the narrator continues to remind readers they are a separate entity from Edna, which creates distance from the protagonist. This strengthens the ostracisation Edna is to be faced with once her true self is ‘awakened’, therefore this form of narration, in the context of the novel, almost prepares the reader for the coming awakening of Edna Pontellier, as she is separate and distant from the reader from the

The journey of Edna’s awakened self mirrors the narrative of her first swim in the ocean. The experience begins suddenly, and Edna is swept up in the joy of it. She continues, oblivious to her direction or position. She loses track of those around her, and is lost in the sensation. Suddenly, she realizes that she cannot sustain herself; she is out too far, and does not know what to do. This is the point Edna is at after Robert’s rejection. This feeling is what leads her to go back to the ocean at the end, and swim out until her physical condition mirrors her spiritual

Edna Pontellier, the main character in Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening, is a woman trying to form her own identity, both feminine and sexually, in the repressive and Victorian Creole world of the latter nineteenth century. She is met by a counterpart, Mademoiselle Reisz, who is able to live freely as a woman. Edna herself was denied this freedom because of the respectable societal position she had been married into and because of her Presbyterian up bringing as a child. The role that Mademoiselle Reisz played within society, a society that failed to view her as being a truly respectable social member, was quite opposite to that of Edna’s respectable position in

For as long as we can remember, the ideologies that society has set into motion regarding women on how to oppress them, has always been a constant issue. Years of control that women have had to face by being told how to act, what to do, how they should feel, and who they are in society, has always been a constant theme in women’s life. Society had oppressed women for so long, that they were afraid to do something completely different from what was portrayed as being right. Slowly, women started to find their voice, and were able to finally understand that their lives didn’t revolve around what their husbands or any other men in their lives needed and wanted. In the novel The Awakening by Kate Chopin, we see how the main character Edna Pontellier is slowly but surely able to overcome these barriers that were put into place by society, especially by three men in her life, Leonce Pontellier, Robert Lebrun, and her father the Colonel. Each man tried to either control or repress Edna, to stop her from exploring stuff that no woman would’ve never dared have tried back in the 1800s. These three men might have been different as to who they were in society, but they all shared that common goal to undermine Edna.

This excerpt is a key passage because it shows the change in Edna Pontellier’s character. In earlier chapters, Edna said she was

Passage of The Awakening This specific piece of The Awakening, when Edna was beginning to encounter that she is her own person, even though society had disagreed strongly, she stayed true to herself. When she says “I am no longer on of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of or not.”, her purpose was to bring individualism vs society into her excerpt. She is informing Robert that she does not have to conform to society, also stating that she is not an item of some sort, therefore she will do as she pleases.

I found Edna’s awakening liberating owning to the fact it was her method to experience complete freedom. Edna realized by being even a fragment of society she could never have absolute freedom from society’s unpleasant expectation of her as a woman and mother. She came to this realization when Robert spoke of Leonce setting her free instead of Robert speaking in the terms of love only; as well as Adele mentioning to her that should have her children in mind. Edna rejected the notion of Leonce allowing her to belong to another man as if she was forever to be property of men; she preferred to be capable of acting freely on her emotions. Furthermore, Adele reminded Edna her actions were not to be base upon her selfish desires, but what society

Her mental awakening has a lot to do with her figuring out her true self and staying true to this. Therefore, now that she is starting to realize her true self, she can’t actually show her true self because the society in which she lives in, is very rigid, there is no chance of self-expression. In this time period in which The Awakening takes place the society has very strict social constraints which impedes Edna from doing what she wants

The Awakening is a feminist story about the internal struggle of Edna Pontellier. Edna is a unhappily married woman who has two children that she does not care for as much as she should. In the beginning of the novel when we meet Edna and we are not really able to see how she feels on the inside we just see the external feelings. Edna is not the kind of woman that she is expected to be in this time period she does not care how she looks in public and does not like being spoiled by her husband and also is not a loving mother.

The Awakening is titled for the spiritual awakening that Edna Pontellier experiences throughout the novel, however, it is her relationship between her and Leonce that cause her

Throughout the Awakening, Edna is able to find some liberation in each of the various places she inhabits, yet it is immediately countered by misery and unfulfillment. This holds true even until the end of the novel when the reader is left with the question of whether Edna has truly found a setting in which she can finally feel whole and be her true self.