Chopin, Kate - Walter Taylor and Jo Ann B. Fineman (essay date fall 1996)

Walter Taylor and Jo Ann B. Fineman (essay date fall 1996)

SOURCE: Taylor, Walter and Fineman, Jo Ann. “Kate Chopin: Pre-Freudian Freudian.” Southern Literary Journal 29, no. 1 (fall 1996): 35-45.

[In the following essay, Taylor and Fineman examine psychoanalytic elements in The Awakening.]

As Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier sits contemplating the sea in The Awakening (1899), her friend Adèle Ratignolle asks a simple question: “Of whom—of what are you thinking?” The question evokes a complex response. Edna replies that she was thinking of a day during her Kentucky childhood when she was walking through a meadow; to a “very little girl” that meadow “seemed as big as the ocean.” And she remembers that she “threw out her arms as if swimming when she walked, beating the tall grass as one strikes out at the water.” Now, at age 28, Edna does not remember why she was walking through that meadow, only that “I felt as...

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