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The Awakening
Chopin depicts Edna's transformation, in part, through the symbols of the sea and music. Edna has a sexual awakening as well as an emotional one when she falls in love with Robert Lebrun at Grand...
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The Awakening
An Entwicklungsroman is a novel that deals with the development and growth of a character from childhood to maturity. Even though this novel does not deal with Edna Pontellier's childhood for a...
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The Awakening
Several aspects of Kate Chopin’s style in The Awakening directly contribute to the reader’s understanding of Edna’s transformation. Although the reader does not learn it in advance, Edna dies at...
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The Awakening
In New Orleans in the late-nineteenth century, as elsewhere in the United States, it was widely assumed that women aspired to be married. Working-class women often worked outside the home or ran...
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The Awakening
Edna is the most complex character in The Awakening, which is fitting since she is the protagonist. However, most of the other characters seem to represent concepts and are static characters. Let's...
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The Awakening
The protagonist Edna certainly changes. She begins the story as a woman trapped in a loveless marriage. The late Victorian society in which she lives asserts that women must be angelic wives and...
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The Awakening
The two earliest flashbacks in the novel and arguably the most important in regards to establishing Edna's character both reveal a depth to Edna's character that would be missing without them. Both...
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The Awakening
Being a mother didn't come naturally to Edna. Though she cared both for an about her children, she was not a particularly loving mother--and she knew it. Our narrator describes her this way: In...
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The Awakening
Setting plays an important role in contributing to the theme of self-discovery in Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening. The novel opens and closes at the seashore, and the ocean is strongly associated...
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The Awakening
In chapter 7 of the novel it is revealed that Edna marries Leonce on "accident." That seems like a rather strange idea, but as the paragraph follows, the situation becomes more clear. Edna was...
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The Awakening
The question of Edna's suicide is a subject of wide debate among critics.Edna struggled with the role of wife and mother. The constrictions placed on her left her unhappy. While it could be argued...
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The Awakening
Mademoiselle Reisz's music evokes feelings within Edna that she has never experienced before. Edna is "fond" of music, and certain pieces rendered by Madame Ratignolle have in the past brought to...
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The Awakening
The dual self is represented by the character of Edna Pontellier. She eventually begins to question society and society's rules—the very rules to which she has outwardly conformed for so long. For...
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The Awakening
This quote is found in Chapter XII when Edna and Robert are walking on the beach in Grand Isle. Among other local figures, Mariequita, described as "a young barefooted Spanish girl" processes...
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The Awakening
When Edna learns to swim, her perception of its significance and import alerts her to the contrast between the way she conceives of her own experiences and the way she is seen by others. While she...
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The Awakening
The central theme of Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening is implied by the title itself. The book is very much about a variety of different kinds of “awakening” experienced by Edna Pontellier, the...
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The Awakening
In The Awakening, the protagonist Edna Pontellier leads a life that does not make her entirely happy. She is married and has children which conforms to the standard social conventions of Edna's...
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The Awakening
The first and most over-arching example of Edna's awakening comes from her learning to swim. At the start of the novel she is just learning to swim and is fearful whenever she is in water and out...
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The Awakening
Society sees institutions and the external, whereas Edna sees only the individual. Society sees a woman as a product, a stage, a means to an end, whereas Edna sees herself as an active agent in the...
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The Awakening
Edna's flashbacks illustrate the fact that Edna has always felt different from the people that surround her. In chapter 7 the narrator says that "even as a child she had lived her own small life...
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The Awakening
This is a fascinating question regarding this excellent novel concerning the breaking away from contemporary gender roles of a woman who experiences an "awakening" about herself. Certainly Edna...
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The Awakening
Madame Ratignolle is the epitome of the perceived woman's role in the Southern Creole society of the time. She is completely devoted to her husband and children and serves as a kind of counterpoint...
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The Awakening
Adele Ratignolle is Edna Pontellier's good friend and a fellow mother on summer vacation at Grande Isle. Her purpose in the novel is to serve as a foil to Edna so that the reader may see how very...
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The Awakening
The sea is an important symbol in Chopin's The Awakening. This phrase "the voice of the sea speaks to the soul" is repeated in this exact or a related form multiple times in the novel, and there is...
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The Awakening
Monsieur and Madam Ratignolle have a "traditional" Southern marriage, and Adele Ratignolle exemplifies the "ideal" Southern woman. She is beautiful, helpless, submissive, and...
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The Awakening
Adèle Ratignolle is what Léonce Pontellier calls a "mother-woman" in The Awakening by Kate Chopin. He describes all mother-women this way: It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended,...
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The Awakening
The most important thing that Robert did for Edna was teach her how to swim. While this might not seem like a big deal, the idea of swimming becomes symbolic as the novel progresses. As Edna's...
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The Awakening
A great section of this brilliant novel to look at in regards to conflict and the way that conflict emerges as a result of Edna's awakening comes in Chapter 11, which is when Edna asserts her will...
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The Awakening
Edna Pontellier's awakening to a greater sense of personal freedom seems to take great strides in her encounters with other people who model or demonstrate to her that freedom in their own...
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The Awakening
In the story you have a few women who certainly challenge the expectations of men and surface as quite independent characters mainly acting against the oppression or expectations of their husbands....
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The Awakening
What is a woman's role in society conflict with her identity and freedom? In what ways are a mother's duty divided and marginalized between herself, her children, and her husband? How is a woman's...
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The Awakening
In Kate Chopin's The Awakening, the story takes place in two settings: New Orleans and Grand Isle. She set the action in New Orleans because she was a Louisiana writer and New Orleans was an ideal...
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The Awakening
The black women in this novel are all servants in the households of the various main characters. They are all unnamed. These two facts alone answer much of your question. The status of black...
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The Awakening
In chapter 19 of Kate Chopin's The Awakening we witness Edna Pontellier growing steadily careless about her role as a wife and mother, and more interested in her self-discovery. This...
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The Awakening
Coming as this episode does in the opening chapter of the novel, this is one of many episodes of debased artistic performances in the novel. The twins later on become irritating in many ways, not...
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The Awakening
In the novel The Awakeningby Kate Chopin, the character of Edna Pontellier is a middle-aged married woman and mother who discovers her hunger for passion and romance for the first time in her...
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The Awakening
In The Awakening the theme of individuality is brought up through the discoveries that Edna Pontellier encounters along the way of trying to find herself as a person and, most importantly, as a...
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The Awakening
You might like to turn to Chapter Six, which is when Edna's awakening begins, and in particular when she comes to associate her awakening with the sea. The sea is of course an incredibly powerful...
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The Awakening
There are many feminist elements of the novel "The Awakening." A woman's role is not, Edna figures out, as a mother and a wife, but something more. She is restless for more. Léonce's opinion is...
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The Awakening
The novel tackles the inferior social status of women, especially in the South. Wealthy women were seen as "trophy wives" of their husbands, just as Edna is for Leonce. Women were expected to...
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The Awakening
First of all, diction is the author's choice of words, phrases, sentence structure, and figurative language that all work together to create the meaning of the text. Second, the narrator's voice...
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The Awakening
This question is perhaps better suited for the discussion boards, because it is somewhat an opinionated question. In my view, no she should not be sympathized with, especially when it comes to her...
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The Awakening
Mademoiselle Reisz is a key character in Kate Chopin'sThe Awakening. She represents two contrasting models of womanhood in the novel. The other model, that of the "mother-woman," is represented by...
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The Awakening
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, tells the story of Edna Pontellier: A married housewife and mother who is on vacation with her family. When we fist meet Edna we only see her outer shell. She seems...
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The Awakening
By the end of The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Edna makes some life-changing discoveries and has learned what to do to be free. She learns that she wants to be valued for more than being a good wife...
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The Awakening
The person who is associated with bathing in the sea with Edna repeatedly in the first few chapters is of course Robert, and this is ironic because of the symbolism of the sea in this novel and how...
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The Awakening
Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" was published in 1899, when women were expected to be dedicated wives and mothers, and follow specific social expectations. Because Edna essentially has an emotional...
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The Awakening
I don't think any books should ever be banned, although parents and librarians should use caution when introducing younger readers to certain texts.The Awakening is a study in female psychology,...
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The Awakening
Alcee Arobin follows Edna around and spends a great deal of time with her while Mr. Pontellier is not home. At first it is simply a friendship, Edna takes no true interest in Alcee because he love...
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The Awakening
If you see Edna as the protagonist and her attempts to define herself independently of husband and children as the mian conflict, it would make sense to me to call her husband, Léonce Pontellier,...
