The Awakening
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In her novel The Awakening, Kate Chopin contrasts two characters, Edna Pontellier and Adèle Ratignolle. Edna is a young woman who makes an important discovery about the nature of her marriage, her role as a woman in her society, and the degree to which her circumstances and the social setting have constrained her. Because of her inability to break free from the prison into which she now feels she has been placed simply by virtue of her being a woman, she commits suicide. Adèle Ratignolle is the woman in whom Edna confides. She is a motherly figure who revels in her roles as wife and mother, a contrast to Edna, who more and more chafes at those roles. Madame Ratignolle is a contrast for Edna, but her lifestyle is not a real choice for the latter, given the artistic temperament Edna possesses and the awareness that Madame Ratignolle is unaware of the fact that she as well should have greater choices than have been offered to her. It is Edna who achieves both the awakening of the title, the awareness of how the social traditions imposed on her are stifling her and preventing her from expressing herself as she would wish, and also fails in that she cannot overcome these traditions and so chooses suicide rather than continue under such a repressive system. Chopin implies that there is a danger in awakening, in understanding the nature of the female role in society, and in trying to overcome that role. Chopin believes that some people possess the energy to keep up with the
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an artist-woman to be.
One of the issues raised with reference to The Awakening concerns the suicide of the main character, the issue being whether this is to be seen as the act of a strong woman who chooses to die rather than capitulate to the social restrictions of her time or as the defeat of a woman too weak to face disappointment and to create a life for herself. It is possible to see Edna as the triumphant woman who makes her own choice in spite of rather than because of social pressure. The result may be self-destruction, but it is still more of a choice than Edna has been able to exercise in her life to that point. Chopin's novel shows, however, that the choices open to women are not as wide as for men, leaving her heroine with the choice to live in repression or die.
Though Edna and Madame Ratignolle become friends, Edna sees the other woman as living in a different world, and it is not a world she wants to enter herself, as indicated after a visit to Madame Ratignolle's home:
The little glimpse of domestic harmony which had been offered her, gave her no regret, no longing. It was not a condition of life which fitted her, and she could see in it but an appalling and hopeless ennui (536).
Later, when she is
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Approximate Word count = 1680
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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