The Importance of Setting in The Awakening Essay

Edna reassesses her spirit more and more as the novel proceeds, with her finally reaching the maxim when committing suicide. At the beginning of the novel she is completely

The reader thinks Edna might just be frustrated with her husband. As the novel shifts to New Orleans, it is clear that she has changed. Edna starts to feel motivated to take action. Finally the setting comes back to Grand Isle, and it is the climax of Edna’s awakening. It is also where she drowns herself. Nobody know for sure whether it was intentional or not since Chopin said, “Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life—that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions”(Chopin 58).

The voice of the sea pulls her back with reminiscence of her childhood. Edna recalls an incident of running through "a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean" (Chopin 60) This connection of the seemingly endless field and the wide expanse of the ocean leads to a realization for Edna. Her life is no longer as plain and simple as it had been for many years. Suddenly, she feels like a little girl running through an unending field, "unthinking and unguided" (Chopin 61). She does not know what she wants from life anymore. She has a husband and children, but the thought of them lacks the feelings of pleasure and love that she should have for them. Instead, they are holding her back, preventing her from running across that wide expanse of grass which symbolizes freedom. She realizes this when she returns home, despondent over what seems to be a loss of her new-found freedom and despondent over the realization that Robert will never gie up society's traditions to be with her, a married woman.

Ranging from caged parrots to the meadow in Kentucky, symbols and settings in The Awakening are prominent and provide a deeper meaning than the text does alone. Throughout The Awakening by Kate Chopin, symbols and setting recur representing Edna’s current progress in her awakening. The reader can interpret these and see a timeline of Edna’s changes and turmoil as she undergoes her changes and awakening.

     In Kate Chopin's novel, The Awakening, Chopin uses the motif of the ocean to signify the awakening of Edna Pontellier. Chopin compares the life of Edna to the dangers and beauty of a seductive ocean. Edna's fascinations with the unknown wonders of the sea help influence the reader to understand the similarities between Edna's life and her relationship with the ocean. Starting with fear and danger of the water then moving to a huge symbolic victory over it, Chopin uses the ocean as a powerful force in Edna's awakening to the agony and complexity of her life.

Although The Awakening may be seen as a tragic love story to some, it is truly a novel that displays the turning point for a woman’s role in the 1900’s. The main character, Edna Pontellier, is the epitome of the new working woman. The story centers around Edna’s discovery of her beliefs which are found through a series of awakenings and contrasted with the social norms of the time.

Like the current beneath its surface, it pulls and tugs at her soul, inviting her to its depths. Edna was attracted to the water, just the same as she was her changes. When she first begins to transition, she was chary and distant, hesitant of its mysterious qualities- she felt the same way towards the ocean. She was not sure why, but she could not resist the temptations of this new fantasy, and she could not stop herself from finding her way back to the water. In her eyes, “the voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation,” (Chopin 33). Edna felt connected to the water; in it, she reached self-actualization and encountered a side of her no one else knew existed...even herself. It was only once its potent seductions drew her in did Edna begin to see and feel the alterations swelling inside her. The true turning point and catalyst in her awakening was her ability to swim on her own. While Edna did attempt to swim before, she was never truly free- she depended on the

Edna’s awakening was the beginning to her suicide. As Edna realized her capacity to be honest with herself, the old Edna began to die. Edna slowly started to realize she did not want to be like other women, whom “idolized their children, worshiped their

The first sign I noticed of Edna’s internal struggle for self worth and importance was in

Due this conflict with her husband, Edna moves closer to the sin of adultery. She begins to have a passionate relationship with a man named Robert Lebrun. He devotes himself to being Edna’s swim teacher. Edna has the courage to go into the ocean and learn how to swim, which can also represent the courage to break the role of a devoted wife and begin an affair with a younger man. During the beginning of her awakening, “The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude”(13).The sea seems to symblolize Edna’s empowerment,and control over her own body as she has courage to swim. However, it is also where Edna takes her own life because her desires will never truly be fulfilled. Her love affair with Robert tempts her to give her into her own sexuality and desires which begins in the sea. This goes against women submissive role in

She is moved by music. During that summer Edna sketches to find an artistic side to herself. She needs an outlet to express who she is. Edna feels that art is important and adds meaning to her life. After the summer is over and they are back to the city and Edna is a changed woman. She makes many steps towards independence. She stops holding "Tuesday socials", she sends her children to live in the country with their grandparents, she refuses to travel abroad with her husband, she moves out of the Lebrun house on Esplanade Street, and to earn money, she starts selling her sketches and betting the horses. She also starts a relationship with another man Alcee Arobin. He meant nothing to her emotionally but she used him for sexual pleasure. Edna evolved above her peers she did not believe that sexuality and motherhood had to be linked. The last step of her "awakening" is the realization that she can not fulfill her life in a society that will not allow her to be a person and a mother. Edna commits suicide in the ocean at Grand Isle.

When she is swimming she finds the strength in herself and she feels so free as if she could do anything. Additionally, when she begins her painting she is reminded of how good she feels after making something of her own. As soon as she begins to feel this way and expressing it everyone is against her, which is why Edna chooses to leave her family and go live on her own. Once she is gone she realizes that this life on her own was not what she expected and it is not at all socially acceptable. Also, when Robert leaves Edna with a note it shows that Edna will always be alone. Even men like Robert cannot choose between their love for a women or their own moral behavior. His mind was never mature enough to fall for his own love for Edna. When Edna reads the note from Robert she realizes her own fate.

In the novel, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Edna is introduced as a respectable woman living in the late 1800’s. She is married to Leonce Pontellier and has two children. While on a vacation, she starts to be conscious of her sexual desires toward a young man, Robert. She does not only unleashed her sexual desires she also find the courage to break any social barriers that oblige her to fulfill her role as a wife and a mother. Edna is against any of society’s structures of motherhood that defines her as the wife of Leonce and the mother of her sons. But she has never found who she is as an individual which brings out her first inwardly questioning of who is Edna Pontellier? She goes on a journey to found out. During that journey, she has conflict between “ that outward existence which conforms, the inward like that questions”. Meaning that by looking at her you would think everything is fine but inside she wonders about the rights and wrongs in her life and what would be the consequences if she did not meet those requirements. Her being married and having children conforms the society’s expectations in Edna’s time but she is thinks about breaking free of this life and finding her independence and happiness. She continually questions that idea whether

Edna has been rebuffed by Robert who, having returned to New Orleans, and after a passionate kiss, on the verge of sexual and emotional climax, leaves her with a note that says simply “Good-by – because I love you” (124). He refuses complicity in her downfall on behalf of a dream. Edna, on the other hand, does not know how to wake from it. It is under the influence of the “voice of the sea” (16) that Edna first began to realize “her position in the universe as a human being,” and, more importantly for us, “to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her” (16). For all her angst, it was not until her experiences in Grand Isle that her consciousness became irrevocably divided into inward and outward states; her love of Robert, the music of Mlle Reisz, and the sea. The sea is Edna’s mirror: it is “seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude, to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation” (16). Like the sea, Edna is a fluid passion, inarticulate, constantly merging, warping, and pouring apart, a perpetual flux of unity, but fundamentally incapable of stability. We are told that the sea “speaks to the soul” (16), that its touch is “sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace” (16), and this lulling, soft, unindividuated enclosure is the only one that Edna can finally take solace in, the only possible outward manifestation of her internal oblivion. She stands on the shore, preparing to wade out into her destiny, noting how, even at this late point, “she felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known” (127). She begins to swim as Robert taught her, going “on and on, thinking of the blue-grass meadow that she had traversed when a little child, believing it had no beginning and no end” (127), until “exhaustion was pressing upon

In Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening, the constant boundaries and restrictions placed on Edna Pontellier by society will lead to her struggle for freedom and her ultimate suicide. Her husband Leonce Pontellier, the current women of society, and the Grand Isle make it evident that Edna is trapped in a patriarchal society. Despite these people, Edna has a need to be free and she is able to escape from the society that she despises. The sea, Robert Lebrun, and Mademoiselle Reisz serve as Edna’s outlets from conformity. “Edna's journey for personal independence involves finding the words to express herself. She commits suicide rather than sacrificing her independent,