The Awakening 1

Sing Ruby Siu
English 48B
March 4, 2009
Journal #17 Kate Chopin

QUOTE:

“Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle…They were women who idolized their children, worshipped their husband, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels” (540).

SUMMARY:
This quote basically summarize the features and behavior of those women who took their maternal role very seriously. In the opening chapters of The Awakening, Mrs. Pontellier spent her summer vacation at Grand Isle in Louisiana. Her experience living among those Creole women made her outstanding and uncomfortable, because she was not accustomed to their way of living. Here, Kate Chopin specifically pointed out that Edna was not one of those kinds. Although she was married to a successful, Creole business, Edna still had a reservation in joining the mainstream of her husband’s society. Her unconventional physical appearance, determination, passions and desires outweighed her need to conform to the conventions of gender role.

RESPONSE:

As Edna was married to a Creole businessman, she destined herself to a living of rich, educated and upper-class, where she lost her freedom as she had to obey her husband’s command. She had nothing for her to accomplish except looking after her children, which she did not love to do, or to saw, which she did not feel it necessary. Before Edna’s trip to the Grand Isle, she never realized that she had an ability to rebel against her fate, or to go back to a place she belonged. Suffering from cultural shocks and an apparent mismatch between her inner self and her outer self, she could only stay silent. She seemed like sleeping, with all her minds and hearts closed and indifferent to her life.

The boredom of life seemed to minimize her ability to think and act, however, this still could not erase the fact that Edna had a “dual life – that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions” (545). The reason why Edna did not behave in a traditional woman role is that she herself did not belong to that particular culture and convention. Throughout the story, we are able to see Edna was an immensely determined woman who had a romantic heart and a heated passion for music and nature. Her intense mind also constantly contemplated about herself, Robert and about all other things. These all show a side of Edna that is alive like a human being. From these, we can observe that it was the external forces that made a person unlike his or her desired self.

Marx’s theory of “social alienation” means “the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to put antagonism between things that are properly in harmony” (Wikipedia). From the Marxist perspective, Edna was the person who experienced social alienation and lived under the tremendous conventions embodied in social class. Living in such a strange environment, Edna was bounded by unacceptable culture, practices and people. These external realities exerted a huge amount of alienated feeling on Edna, which made her unable to fuse into her environment so she had to live with a confusing and obscure struggle of identity. The confusion of actions, intentions and psyche urged her to withdraw from socialization and conventions.