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Bird Imagery In The Awakening - College Essays

Bird Imagery In The Awakening

Throughout The Awakening, Kate Chopin conveys her ideas by using carefully crafted symbols that reflect her characters' thoughts and futures. One of the most important of these symbols, the bird, appears constantly, interwoven in the story to provide an insight to the condition of Edna's and her struggle. At each of the three stages of her struggle, birds foreshadow her actions and emphasize the actions' importance while the birds' physical state provides an accurate measure of that of Edna's.
Early in the novel, while Edna attempts to escape from society's strong grasp, birds emphasize her entanglement by forecasting her actions and monitor her development by reflecting her feelings. The ...

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her from communicating. The only person in society that begins to understand her, Robert, eventually decides that he must remain a member of society instead of staying with her. He says that "you [Edna] were not free; you were Leonce Pontellier's wife" and that "[Robert] was demented, dreaming of wild, impossible things...[such as] men who had set their wives free" (108). Robert does not want to do something wild and unacceptable to society. In a situation parallel to that of Edna's, the only bird that understands the parrot is the mockingbird (Reisz) that "[is] whistling its fluty notes upon the breeze with maddening persistence" (1). Because the parrot continues to shriek, people move it away from their society: "[Mr. Farvial] insisted upon having the bird removed and consigned to regions of darkness" (23). Society wants to hide the bird in darkness, as it wants to do to Edna, in order to keep the bird from causing problems. The bird, like Edna, is the only one "who possessed ...

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Bird Imagery In The Awakening. (2008, September 6). Retrieved January 10, 2026, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Bird-Imagery-In-The-Awakening/89529

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 9/6/2008 10:17:53 PM
Category: English
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 864
Pages: 4

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