Edna's Suicide In The Awakening
The novel, The Awakening, by Kate Chopin is set in the late
nineteenth century, in Louisiana. This is a place and time for women to
submit themselves to the wants and needs of husbands and families. The
protagonist, Edna Pontellier, isn’t content with being a mother-woman, one
of the ordinary, traditional women who, "...idolized their children,
worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it to a holy privilege to efface
themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels"( Chopin 51).
Edna wanted more, and as there were very few women at this time leading
the way to break these sorts of glass ceilings, Edna looked for women
within her life to model herself after.
Adele ...
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the closing of The Awakening commits suicide by walking into
the ocean. Perhaps if there had been a more well rounded woman figure in
Edna’s life, she wouldn’t have felt the life she craved was, “...an
undefined, unexpressed, ineffable life that she cannot articulate or shape”
(Spangler). In witnessing other women achieve the articulation of a
complexly spirited life, she may have found a new life easier to attain.
Adele serves as the perfect "mother-woman" in The Awakening, being
both married and pregnant, but Edna does not follow Adele’s footsteps. For
Edna, Adele appears unable to perceive herself as an individual human being.
She possesses no sense of herself beyond her role as wife and mother, and
therefore Adele exists only in relation to her family, not in relation to
herself or the world. Edna respects art, but does not respect Adele’s
reasoning for playing the piano, “She was keeping up her music on account
of the children, she said: because she and her husband both ...
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the first time her
being was ready to take an impress of the abiding truth”(71). Because
Reisz’s music evoked this out pouring of feelings in Edna, there is a
special bond between the two women. This bond grows and strengthens
throughout the course of their relationship.
Edna, although sometimes confused by her conversations with Reisz,
also finds strength. She explains to Alcee Arobin how Reisz sometimes
makes her feel, “She says queer things sometimes in a bantering way that
you don’t notice at the time and you find yourself thinking about afterward”
(Chopin 138). She is referring to her conversation with Reisz just prior
to her meeting Arobin, but her statement to applies to all ...
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"Edna's Suicide In The Awakening." Essayworld.com. January 15, 2004. Accessed November 22, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Ednas-Suicide-In-The-Awakening/1500.
"Edna's Suicide In The Awakening." Essayworld.com. January 15, 2004. Accessed November 22, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Ednas-Suicide-In-The-Awakening/1500.
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