Sea As A Motif In The Awakening

Adele Ratignolle serves as a foil to Edna, since she is the ultimate embodiment of the perfect wife and mother. Adele belongs to a group of women “who idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels” (Chopin 10). Adele is everything that Edna is not as a mother. Despite this, Edna and Adele find themselves in similar situations. Adele too cannot escape her children, so much so that “she has no way of conceiving of herself as a separate person” (Bogarad 160). Edna herself recognizes Adele’s entrapment, feeling “pity for that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor of blind contentment…” (Chopin 74). The only difference between Edna and Adele is that while Edna rejects her role, Adele blindly embraces it. Conversely, Mademoiselle Reisz is unmarried with no children. She is free. Mademoiselle Reisz expresses herself through her music and she is not afraid to reveal her emotions, causing her to be seen as an “eccentric, unpleasant ‘old maid’” (Bogarad 160). Despite this, Mademoiselle Reisz’s lifestyle is what Edna desires for herself. When Edna attempts to paint she finds she only is able to when she is feeling content. She wants to express her feelings towards Robert yet they are suppressed. Mademoiselle Reisz does not face these challenges, proving that the

Another reason Mademoiselle Reisz is significant to Edna is because she is the only one who knows about and Robert and Edna’s love. Mademoiselle explains Robert’s love for Edna, “ It is because he loves you, poor fool, and is trying to forget you, since you are not free to listen to him or belong to him ” (95). Edna’s love for Robert is the reason why she quickly becomes uninvolved with her family and the life she is socially supposed to have. She does what she wants with disregard to anything her husband has to say.

Mademoiselle Reisz understood what it means to be an artist. She was an “artist at the piano” (Chopin 554). Mademoiselle Reisz was isolated from society. She lived alone with practically no friends, except Robert and Edna. Her proprietor described her as “the most disagreeable and unpopular woman” (Chopin 580). Mademoiselle Reisz defied society’s convention. She devoted herself entirely to art; as a result, she became ostracized from society (Koloski 119). She plays music, not for others, but for herself. She told Edna that she was “the only

A foil for Adele Ratignolle, Mademoiselle Reisz serves as a living example of an entirely self-sufficient woman, who is ruled by her art and her passions, rather than by the expectations of society. A small homely woman, unmarried and childless, Mademoiselle Reisz is a talented pianist and somewhat of a recluse. She represents the anti-mother along independence and freedom. The first time she is introduced in the novel she is introduced as being “eccentric and quarrelsome”, from that we are able to infer that she is unlike the other women. Later as the novel continues to progress from her house and manner of expression we are again able to infer that she is unlike the other Creole women. For her home is an apartment above everyone, with a view, that is disagreeable and often cold. Mademoiselle Reisz is the woman that Edna could have become should she have remained independent of her husband and children and lived to old age.

Edna's feelings of despondency fade as the sea's spell reaches out for her again. The narrator points out that "[the] voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in

Chopin uses the first hand description of Adele from Edna as a literary comparison to previous descriptions of Adele, allowing insight into Edna’s own perceptions and changing world view.

Mademoiselle Reisz is the epitome of what Edna wishes she had become, Edna is covetous of Mademoiselle’s lifestyle. Madame Reisz is a carefree woman who could not care less about what society thinks of her. Edna sees what kind of person Mademoiselle is through her music. “The woman, by her divine art, seemed to have reached Edna’s spirit and set it free.” Through Edna’s friendship with Mademoiselle Reisz, Edna starts to find herself as a woman. “She was seeking herself and finding herself in just such sweet, half-darkness which met her moods.” Mademoiselle Reisz shows Edna that she can be herself and be independent

Later on in the novel, Edna speaks about how Mademoiselle Reisz checks her shoulder blades for strength because “the bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings” (Chopin 79). While many characters shut Reisz off because of how strange she is, Edna visits her because of their unspoken, mutual understanding of the significance of the potential power and precedence that her true, inner identity could hold if she let it fly free. At the end of the novel, Chopin describes a “bird with a broken wing” who circles “disabled down, down to the water” (108) to reflect how the strength of Edna’s inner identity breaks her because her spirit is too weak to maintain her desires alongside her realization that she could never be truly happy again in this time of unbreaking oppression and possession. Elz notes that if Edna continues to live that she will always be moving from relationship to relationship to satisfy her true desires, even though - in contrast - she wishes for her existence to not be defined by her relationships with men. “Like the mockingbird,” Elz continues, Edna “insists on her way” and therefore refuses to accept the roles society pushes on her and, in result, commits suicide as her inner identity wins and proves that she can not be controlled (20).

“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, and inviting the soul to wander for a spell in the abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation." (Chopin 13). Edna was a person that found passion within arts of life, her admiration to her most intimate friend who had the gift of writing, a personal way of expressing, as well as Mademoiselle Reisz who played the piano with a passion that broke tradition for which Edna was the only one to appreciate it, Mademoiselle Reisz music evoked a waking with Edna 's body and soul that could not compare to nothing else - "But the very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it lashing it as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her"(Chopin 27). Approximating the end of the summer Edna also nears a personal growth within, she learns to swim, simply ineffable to Edna but ordinary to many other people would not care for its gift, she learned to swim and she went as far into the ocean where no woman had swum before, a point in Edna 's life that prepares her to open herself up for new choices. She choices to find shelter in a man that had aroused herself as a young beautiful woman, she choices to dream and long for Robert Lebrun like the other forbidden men in her childhood, but its only when she returns to her charming home on

After returning from vacation, Edna is a changed woman. When her husband and children are gone, she moves out of the house and purses her own ambitions. She starts painting and feeling happier. “There were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day” (Chopin 69). Her sacrifice greatly contributed to her disobedient actions.

The sea is very compelling to Edna and its significance grows as the novel progresses, we experience Edna’s subtle changes as she listens to the sea with its "sonorous murmur [that] reached her like a loving but imperative entreaty"(Chopin, p.15). In time, Edna becomes more enthralled with the sea as “the voice of the sea speaks to the soul; the touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace” (Chopin, p.16). However, the danger of the sea is also exiting to her, as Edna is seized with, “a certain ungovernable dread” when she enters the water (Chopin, p.15). However, despite this she experiences her first awakening and takes her first step towards self-discovery and independence, taking the plunge she swims on her own, “as a feeling of dare and recklessness, and a desire to swim far out, where no woman had swam before” (Chopin, p.31). This point in the novel represents the rising action in the plot as the water and Edna’s fearlessness acts as a metaphor, signalling a form of baptism for her new life, and the death of her old life. Hence, the reader notes that Chopin juxtaposes comments with regard to the sea representing Edna’s new beginnings, “[The] beginning of things, of a world especially that is necessarily vague, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from

Another similarity between the two women is in regard to their taste in men. At one point in the novel, Mademoiselle Reisz mentions that "If I were young and in love with a man it seems to me he would have to be some grand esprit; it seems to me if I were young and in love I should never deem a man of ordinary caliber worthy of my devotion." (81) This definition of Mademoiselle’s ideal love almost perfectly matches that of Edna’s. For Edna was searching for the same qualities within Robert; a change, something that goes astray from the ordinary. Mr. Pontellier, her husband, was simply that, ordinary, which she did not want.

Chopin notes, "Perhaps it was the first time she was ready, perhaps the first time her being was tempered to take an impress of the abiding truth" (699). Mlle. Reisz feels the music is a mode of communication between Edna and herself. This prompts her to tell Edna during a party, "You are the only one worth playing for" (Chopin 700). The music calls to something within Edna, which further wakes her from the slumber of domesticity. As Edna realizes the expressive nature of music, she wants to apply this expression to her painting. She seeks the encouragement of her first teacher of expression, Madame Ratignolle, hoping her kind words will "help her put her heart into her venture" (Chopin 723). When Edna surrendered to "the service of art" her husband noted, "she was not herself. That is, he could not see the she was becoming herself" (Chopin 724). Self-expression through art progresses Edna in her new sense of self, but one more form must be learned to complete her transformation.

Streater believes that Chopin described two different types of women symbolizing feminism through Edna and Adele. Throughout the novel, Streater indicates that the actions by Adele support the assigned gender roles. Adele is content with her life while Edna always wanted more. Edna looked up to Mademoiselle Reisz as the role model who according to Streater did not have such qualities. Edna is too blinded by the dire need of perceived freedom, but this was authentic feminist potential (Streater 412). However, the author requires the reader to interrogate the popular and suppressive societal demands (Streater 410). Adeptly, Streater gets the core of the matter by trying to make the reader identify with Adele instead of Edna. She wanted her audience to see that Chopin’s followers or readers would resemble domestic situation as experienced by Adele and not Edna’s rejection path.

She was a character with a ingrown desire for individuality, yet aware that she must embrace the “dual life—the outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions.”(13). All around her are examples of people either in society (Adele), or the opposition (Reisz), but Edna refuses to be considered either—ending with what most would consider a tragedy: excommunication and the subsequent death of someone who was supposed to fit in. The responsibility of this death lies both with Edna and the system she was forced to be a part of. Akin to how it is her duty to find her own happiness, it is the duty of the system around someone to do everything possible to allow those under it to find their meaning, and that is where The Grand Isle failed. Through this societal failure to accept new types of people, Chopin is saying in this work neither that all women must ostracize themselves to find happiness, nor that all woman must fit in to be content. Instead, Chopin is saying that if a society wishes to embrace all who are born into it, it must grow itself to embrace those who do not fit in, as opposed to forcing those who do not fit in to change