The Importance of the Sea in The Awakening Essay

This is the point in the story where Edna starts listening to her voices inside her gives into her inner desires. She continues to struggle with the fact that she married out of convenience and she has two sons that she really does not want to mother as well as the fact that she loves being an artist. In chapter x, Edna goes to the sea only to realize that all her swimming lesson had finally paid off that summer and she was swimming. Chopin describes this even like a baby finally getting enough confidence to walk and the baby walks realizing its own strength and power. While swimming, she soon gets tired and has quick feeling overcome her of the possibility of drowning but quickly swims back to shore. She has conquered her greatest fear and now feels like a new woman that is no longer afraid of her true feelings. Edna’s affair with Robert continues and he eventually leaves Grand Isle and her and her family returns home.

Whether coerced or through self realizations, there were many awakenings in the book. The first was that Edna was not the traditional mother like Adèle, the second was that she enjoyed doing things for herself instead of for her children and husband. This second awakening is shown when Edna takes time to talk

Edna gains metaphorical wings in the form of self-actualization and newfound freedom. However, she strays too close to the harmful and unobtainable thing that is a relationship outside of marriage with someone she actually loves, Robert. In doing so, she brings about her own downfall.

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

Edna undergoes more than one awakening within the novel (). She is awakening to the independent life (). “It was the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded. It was a flaming torch that kindled desire” (114). Edna spent the first twenty-eight years of her life as a repressed woman; here she experiences passion for the first time.

Explanation Edna Pontellier is awakened during this book. She discovers herself and discovers her own interests during the course of this novel.

During the first swim, being too distant from the shore would cause a “flash of terror” on Edna. Her first “quick vision of death” makes her hurry back to her waiting husband and friends. It is interesting to notice that on the night of her awakening, she is overwhelmed with a vision of death, but at the novel's end, she has a vision of life's beginning, she “heard her father’s voice and her sister Margaret’s. She heard the barking of an old dog that was chained to the sycamore tree”. She is taken back to her

After rejecting to go to bed all evening, Edna is lastly overwhelmed with fatigue. Although Edna won the stand-off with her spouse over Edna joining her husband in bed immediately and got Robert to go to the island with her, she is experiencing the consequences of her impulsive and erratic behavior. While at church, Edna starts to feel faint and gets a cephalgia, so she suddenly leaves the mass with Robert following hastily after her. Robert transports her to Madame Antoine's household, where it is colder, silent, and passive. Madame Antoine is very welcoming and consents Edna to slumber in her vast, hygienic bed. Edna slowly disrobes and she observes the magnificence of her arms for the first time, and her senses are stimulated by the freshness of the sites and people around her, soon falling into slumber.

Edna’s awakening allows the two distinct female models of society to become clear, and her awakening causes her to feel unable to conform to either model. Edna’s arousal is that which opens her eyes to see her potential apart from her current life. Spending time in Grand Isle unveils a new

As a result of the illuminating incidents in both The Awakening and The Poisonwood Bible, the true characters of the protagonists are shown. This crucial moment in The Awakening occurs during Edna’s first swim out to sea, revealing the change in Edna’s character, just as Adah and Leah’s characters

The Awakening begins in the vacation spot of Grand Isle. At first we believe that Grand Isle is a utopia, wealthy families relaxing at oceanside, but it is here where Edna first begins to realize her unhappiness. The first sign of dissatisfaction is when Edna allows herself to feel that her marriage is unsatisfying, yet she must agree with the other women that Leonce Pontellier is the perfect husband. Edna asks herself that if she has a good husband

Edna has a husband and two children but instead of her family bringing her joy and peace in Edna’s mind they weigh her down and make her a slave. Edna wants to be free from her family and she finds moments of freedom when she swims at grand Isle and hangs out with her lover Robert. As the book continues Edna pushes herself away from her family

Throughout the book, Edna is almost constantly found going to the beach, at the beach, or thinking about the beach. Early on, the beach is identified to be one of Edna's escapes, and a catalyst to her many awakenings. As she lays leisurely on the beach one day, thinking of the sea, she comes to the realization that "the sea speaks to [her] soul" in a way that aids her in realizing the cage that she has been living in all her life (17). It is no coincidence that the story takes place on an island, and the sea is utilized to symbolize an escape from the isolation that the conventions of being a submissive woman has created for her. Later on, when she goes sailing, she feels freedom from captivity again as she gets farther away from her home and family. As they sail, she feels as if "[her] chains had been loosening" from the tight confines of trying to be the perfect woman for her society, while also maintaining her own happiness (34). Not every symbolic use of the sea is quite so literal, but in this instance, Edna is portrayed as one chained in a jail, which represents her home life. The sea acts as her key to loosen these chains. Of course, this is all pretty ironic, because the only way she can free herself in the end is to kill herself by finally drowning herself in the sea, which is

The deceptive nature of the ocean entices Edna into imagining the possibility of gaining independence from Mr. Ponteillier, and through demonstrating Mr. Ponteillier inability to differentiate the danger from the beauty of the natural scenes, Chopin reveals that there is danger when one insists to pursue his/her unrealistic aspiration. In the early stage of the novel, when Edan first approaches the ocean, she feels enlightened as she “[beings] to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her, [which] may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight”(13). Despite the positive tone apparent in these lines

As the title of the novel reveals, awakenings are the most important as well as the most emotional parts of the story. Edna slowly awakens to her true self. She begins "daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world." She creates her own awakenings with dreams and paintings (Gilbert 104). It is as if she tried to begin again, making a life that she could control and to become a new woman and be herself rather than what she was expected to be. Edna's awakenings were all a part of her defining her own self(Rosowski 44). She feared to have the conventional life that so many women had become trapped in. As she awakens, Edna becomes less and less traditional by stripping