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The Awakening (Cyclopedia of Literary Characters)

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Characters Discussed

Edna Pontellier (pohn-tehl- YAY), a sensitive, impressionable twenty-eight-year-old who feels out of place in the French-Creole society into which she has married. She has two small children whom she loves, although she feels temperamentally unsuited for the confining roles of wife and mother, which are the only roles available to women of her social class in the late nineteenth century. She has regarded sex as an unenjoyable if not actually unpleasant wifely duty and has been unaware of her repressed sexuality until the time that the novel opens. Her whole...

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