Kate Chopin

4 Pages 1032 Words

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, is a classic feminist book most often read for its portrait of Victorian marriage. In this story, Chopin tries to let all women know that they can experiment with sexuality throughout their motherhood. Chopin’s struggle with motherhood and bisexuality caused the character of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening to be an undevoted mother and wife.
Edna Pontellier was a good mother when protecting her children from harm, but she never mistaked herself for them. She exclaims as she talks to Madame Ratignolle that, “She would give up the unessential; her money and her life but she would not give herself (Chopin 80). Edna seems to believe there is something more than her life that could be taken, which Madame Ratignolle finds hard to believe. She says, “But a woman who would give her life for her children could do no more than that” (Chopin 80). Edna also seemed to value her needs over her husbands and unlike her kids he noticed it. “He found it very discouraging that his wife who was the soul object of his existence, evinced so little interest in things which concerned him and valued so little his conversation” (Chopin 12). His comment shows that the disappearing acts were not all his fault; actually he wanted to work things out and make the marriage better. He even wondered if his wife was unbalanced mentally, “ He could see plainly that she was not herself, he could see that she was becoming herself and casting aside that fictitious self who she appeared before the world” (Chopin 96). His accusation was accurate as it could be. Edna was going to become a new woman on the twenty-eighth of August at the hour of midnight.
Yes. On the twenty-eight of August, at the hour of midnight, and if the moon is
shining-the moon must be shining-a spirit that has haunted these shores for ages
rises up from the Gulf. With its own penetrating vision the ...