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In Kate Chopin's The Awakening, how does the sea symbolize rebirth?

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"The Awakening" is a short story written by Kate Chopin in 1899 about Edna Pontellier. Edna is an unhappy woman who moves to New Orleans. Her husband, Leonce treats her like a child and does not allow her independence. After some time she meets another man and realizes that there is more to life than housework. She decides to leave her husband and children for this man but on the way back from Grand Isle, she becomes ill and dies.

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Edna Pontellier has long sought to be free in the oppressive society in which she lives. Her husband, Leonce, is regarded as a good husband, but he is oblivious to her true feelings and enjoys a great deal of freedom while making his wife wholly responsible for the children. Even while vacationing at Grand Isle, Edna begins to feel depressed. "An indescribable oppression...filled her whole being with oppression. It was like a shadow, like a mist passing across her soul's summer day," Chopin writes. Edna is overtaken by dread and wants her independence, but affairs with Robert LeBrun, whom she loves and who leaves her, and another man do not bring her the happiness and freedom she desires.

At the end of the story, Edna still feels oppressed by the roles she must fulfill as a woman. As she is wandering along the beach, her children appear before her...

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like "antagonists who had overcome her...and who sought to drag her into soul's slavery for the rest of her days." Feeling that she will never be free, she takes off her clothes and stands before the ocean. Chopin writes, "For the first time in her life she stood naked in the open air." The freedom and nakedness that Edna experiences are like a rebirth. The thoughts going through her head are of the freedom of childhood, such as the "blue-grass meadow that she had traversed as a child." As the water transports Edna away from the restrictions of the shore, it's almost as if she is going back to childhood and then to the safety of the womb. Only the water can free her and give her a kind of symbolic rebirth that life on shore, filled with male domination, cannot give her.

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The sea symbolizes rebirth because, first, it was one of Edna's first accomplishments that set her aside from co-dependence: the fact that she would swim.

Second, the sea would always be a focal point of relaxation for her.

Third, when the end came and Edna realized that her hopes and illusions were never going to be fulfilled her way, she opted to bare herself completely and take a long swim. In the nursing waters of the ocean, she was able to realize her fate, and she figured that in order to end a life of dissatisfaction she could give herself to the waters as if in a form of baptismal redemption.

She had no fear when she realized that she was too tired to return to shore. Equally, she was too worn out in emotion to return to life as she knew it. She had awoken to her real self and it was nearly impossible to go back to a life she utterly disliked.

Hence, the ocean was Edna's way to give herself to the ocean, die embraced in the ocean that signifies freedom, and perhaps be reborn into a free spirit. Which, is what Edna really was.

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In Kate Chopin's The Awakening, how does the sea symbolize freedom?

At the end of the novel The Awakening, Edna goes out into the sea to swim.  It has been revealed earlier that Edna has not known how to swim and has only recently learned.  So at the end of the novel, swimming far out into sea is probably something that Edna should not reasonably be doing.  This is the clue that Edna's actions are not meant to be read literally, but figuratively.  Eventually, Edna continues far out into the sea and her body becomes tired, and although it is not stated directly, it is implied that she drowns herself.  For the length of the book, Edna has been trying to break free from her lifestyle which she finds constricting, but she can never manage to be truly happy in the paths that she takes.  The sea for Edna is expansive and holds limitless possibilities, and this is what she wants for her life.  Her suicide by means of the sea is symbolic of her finally attaining the freedom that she has been seeking.

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