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The Awakening And A League Of Their Own: Literary Analysis

Good Essays

Bianca Kelley
Mrs. W
ENGL 1302
5 July 2015

Wishful Freedom

In The Awakening and A League of Their Own both Kate Chopin and director Penny Marshall show how a woman’s role were during the 20th century. Though both may have a different setting they both illustrate feminism very well. The Awakening is a short story written about a woman, who practically dreams a life of independence. She shows interest in a man while married to a strict business man with two kids. Edna soon escapes her trapped world by committing suicide, drowning herself in the calm waters of the ocean. A League of Their Own, illustrates the 1940’s during WWII when baseball players were drafted to the war. To keep baseball running they selected several women to make the …show more content…

society conflict through gender roles. Like Chopin’s character Edna, she struggles with trying to be a part of a life she does not want to be a part of. Edna declares that she is not a possession which contradicted the Louisiana Laws during the 20th century. “You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Pontellier’s possession’s to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say; Hey, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours; I should laugh at your both.” (Chopin, 42) Just as Edna felt like her femininity was limited women such as Dottie Henson and Doris Murphy who played for the first female baseball team. Dottie and some of her teammates got hounded about playing the sport like Mae Mordobito, Ellen Sue Got lander, and Doris Murphy. Quoted by a man in the stands he dances trying to betray himself as a woman saying “Girls don’t play baseball.” This taunt makes the women angry hence why Ellen Sue throws a baseball at the man. Both Edna and the women in the film entered this stage of independency but yet were still reminded of their duties as women. Though they had dreams and beliefs society wouldn’t let them be fully independent which motivated many women if not all to fight for their rights during the late 19th century and during the 20th

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