Discussion Topic
Chopin's portrayal of Edna's transformation in The Awakening through stylistic choices
Summary:
Chopin portrays Edna's transformation in The Awakening through stylistic choices such as vivid imagery, symbolism, and varying narrative perspectives. These techniques illustrate Edna's evolving sense of self and her internal conflicts, emphasizing her journey towards independence and self-awareness.
How does Chopin depict Edna’s transformation in The Awakening through stylistic choices?
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 the end. This fact would have made it very difficult to use Edna as a first-person narrator—although authors do sometimes turn the tables on their readers this way. Chopin apparently uses the conventional approach of having a third-person narrator. In this way, she can offer comments about Edna’s appearance that Edna would be unlikely to express, as well as to speculate on her motivations. This decision also gives Chopin a way to provide the husband’s perspective, which helps contextualize Edna’s dilemma. The reader can identify the narrator’s point of view with that of the dominant social order, as this narrator more often questions Edna’s feelings and opinions than supports them. Within that critique, Chopin also incorporates foreshadowing of...
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thetragedy to come.
In chapter 2, regarding Edna, the narrator describes her tendency to seem distracted or lost in thought.
She had a way of turning them [her eyes] swiftly upon an object and holding them there as if lost in some inward maze of contemplation or thought.
Here the phrase “inward maze” implies confusion or an unresolved problem, which proves to be a central theme.
After Léonce chastises Edna for inadequately attending to the boys, and she has a good cry by herself, the narrator again describes her internal state, now emphasizing its unfamiliarity and vagueness.
An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul's summer day.
This “shadowy anguish” is referenced in chapter 6, after feelings for Robert begin to stir. While the earlier experience had occurred at night in the dark, the shift in her attitude and awareness happens during the day as she considers going bathing (swimming), and the narrator also uses light as a metaphor.
A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her—the light which, showing the way, forbids it.
At that early period it served but to bewilder her. It moved her to dreams, to thoughtfulness, to the shadowy anguish which had overcome her the midnight when she had abandoned herself to tears.
The emphasis remains on her confusion, but now the narrator also mentions dreams and thoughts. At this point, the critical tone of the narrator becomes stronger, as they wryly comment on the burden of having such thoughts. Chopin uses this critical stance as foreshadowing, with the narrator accurately predicting Edna’s tragic end.
But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!
How does Chopin portray Edna's transformation in 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 Isle, a summer resort for New Orleans elite families. She begins to understand the social mores that have long controlled her, as well as her own complacency, and she determines that she will no longer do things as though she were on the "daily treadmill of the life which has been portioned out to us."
Edna has never learned to swim, and she suddenly determines to learn, a symbol of her growing independence and unwillingness to be restrained by social rules and traditions anymore. Further, the sea is always described in a very sensual way, emphasizing Edna's new ideas about her body:
The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude ... The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.
At the same time that the narrator describes the sea like this, the narrator says that a "certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within [Edna]." In addition, the effect music has on Edna seems to be connected to her growing awareness of her own desires—both physical and emotional. When she hears Mademoiselle Reisz play the piano,
the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her.
We see here how Edna's emotional growth and awakening is very much connected to her new physical awareness and how her transformations are developed through the use of these two symbols.