Essays on The Awakening

In Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening, Edna’s marriage is complicated. Her marriage is both a source of positive and negative influence on her, in that it both confines, imprisons, and depresses her while also providing her with an impetus, reasoning, and inspiration for her individual...

The final, powerful scene of The Awakening by Kate Chopin provides a fitting end to Edna’s long struggle between expectation and desire. Edna’s traditional role of wife and mother holds her back from her wish to be a free woman. Both the sea and the...

Character: In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, the role of main character is filled by Mrs. Edna Pontellier, a young wife and mother living in 1890’s New Orleans who starts her journey to discovering herself while on a family vacation in Grand Isle. Edna is immediately...

Leonce Pontellier, the husband of Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, becomes very perturbed when his wife, in the period of a few months, suddenly drops all of her responsibilities. After she admits that she has “let things go,” he angrily asks, “on account...

In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, the sea symbolizes Edna’s freedom from oppression. Edna feels suffocated by conventional society and has no interest in being a devoted wife or mother. She feels trapped with Leonce and her children, but does not have the abilities required to...

While there is arguably no justification for suicide, in the novel The Awakening by Kate Chopin, it is Edna’s act of freedom. The time period in which it happens, and the events that lead up to it only give a clear explanation that all she...

In Kate Chopin’s controversial novel “The Awakening”, the protagonist, Mrs. Edna Pontellier, experiences a personal rebirth, becoming an independent, sexual, and feeling woman, shunning the restraints of the oppressive society in which she lives. This awakening happens on Grand Isle, a luxurious island on which...

Kate Chopin seamlessly integrates plot with setting in her novel The Awakening. Various locations mold Edna Pontellier into a bold transgressor of outdated social conventions, and allow for her dynamic growth. Edna grows accustomed to the lax customs found on Grande Isle, and gradually transitions...

In The Awakening, author Kate Chopin offers a tale of self exploration and fulfillment in protagonist Edna, who finds herself at odds with the warped society that is her reality. Taking place primarily in Louisiana islands, the Gulf of Mexico is perhaps, the second most...

Creating a social sensation when it was introduced in 1899, The Awakening was labeled one of the first feminist novels as it fell into tone with the rapidly rising group of young women who demanded political and social equality. The reader witnesses Edna Pontellier’s transformation...

In the aftermath of the Civil War, many artists and writers were inspired to reject the lofty ideals of romanticism and focus attention on a new movement – one representing aspects of everyday life. American realist authors such as Mark Twain and Charles Chestnutt are...

In The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, unsatisfied Edna longs for something to sweep her off her feet. When it does, in the form of fresh love Robert, Edna realizes that she must choose between her family and her own mind and soul. At this realization,...

Characters win the reader’s attention through common grounds of understanding, situation, or personality. Playing the major role, protagonists possess distinguishing characteristics of a complex character. In The Awakening, Kate Chopin develops the protagonist’s appearance through direct and dramatic description, her personality through her reactions, and...

Much controversy surrounds the ending of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and for good reason; the novel can be used to support two completely opposing views. On one hand the suicide of Edna Pontellier can be seen as the ultimate culmination of Edna’s awakening as she...

The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, explores the emotional and spiritual consequences of sexism in the early 1900’s. During this time, women were legally viewed as the property of their husbands, and were often shamed for things like sexual promiscuity, lack of dependence on a husband,...

In her novel, The Awakening, Kate Chopin shows Edna Pontellier¹s confrontations with society, her imprisonment in marriage and Edna¹s exploration of her own sexuality. Chopin also portrays Edna as a rebel, who after her experiences at Grand Isle wants to live a full and a...

A woman sits alone in her empty living room, overtaken by an unbearable ennui. She sits cross-legged, with one elbow propped up on the faded, beige armrest, and the other resting on her thigh. She sighs with exasperation as she patiently awaits her children’s arrival...

“If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were?”. At this point in Picoult’s story, Alex must figure out how to discipline her daughter, Josie. Alex and Josie are in a supermarket where a...

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening was a novella set during 1899, in New Orleans, and the main character Edna Pontellier was a controversial character. Edna was searching for her purpose and searches for an “awakening”. She is not able to fulfill her job as the ‘mother-woman’...