Ethan Frome and The Awakening
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Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome and Kate Chopin's The Awakening are novels about the traps that society creates for the individual. In both books suicide is seen as the only way out of the constricted circumstances in which the characters are expected to live. In both books, however, the authors also make it clear that society's confinement of the individual does not affect just their suffering heroes. In fact, these social constraints affect most of the characters. In Chopin's novel, the dramatic difference between Leonce Pontellier and Edna Pontellier is in his choice to adapt to his cage and her becoming conscious of the cage and finding its constraints unbearable. In Wharton's novel, both the Fromes suffer from the cage in which they find themselves, but their responses to their entrapment, while they differ in content, are alike in form as each blames the other. In nineteenth century society, especially in a highly structured society such as that of New Orleans, women's positions were everything to them so long as they wished to continue living on good terms with the larger group. But men were expected to adhere to a code as well. Men's behavior was freer than women's, but this does not mean that there was not a great deal of pressure to conform. In a tightly knit group or in a rural area, to break faith with the mores of the group might mean that one would be cast out. A smaller group has greater power to sanction the individual transgressor. There were, of cou
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antage of being born into this particular group and, perhaps if she had stayed at home and married there, she never would have glimpsed the idea of freedom that proved ruinous to her.
Edna is, at least in dramatic terms, freed by this to make her own mistakes. But what is unfortunate for her is that the contrast between the rigid form of Creole society and its apparently formless content awakens something in Edna that cannot be answered. Such an awakening demonstrates the force of social prohibitions. The Creoles can behave as they always do because they have always operated within their rigid rules. Edna has operated within a different set of rules and, on transferring to this society, the contrast between the type of strictures that she grew up with and the apparent freedom of the new society's behavior allows her a glimpse of something better than either. Like the infant in the pajamas whose eyes alone can be seen, Edna uses the peephole that her experience provides to look beyond the rigidity of the society.
The tragedy of Edna Pontellier derives from her misreading of the freedom she sees in New Orleans. She take sit to its logical conclusion and comes to believe that freedom to realize her own goals is desirable
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2978
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)
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