The Awakening

4 Pages 915 Words

Life Is A Dream
Response To The 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; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.”

The Awakening, Kate Chopin


That summer at Grand Isle changed her life forever. The sea, the people, the atmosphere in general all gave way to Edna Pontellier’s “awakenings.” In Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening, Edna undergoes a process of serious self-examination into her life as a mother, wife, and a woman stuck under the pressures of high society. These awakenings all seem to focus around Edna’s search to find her soul underneath the shrouds of formality and her roles in society. In addition, Edna seems to focus around the idea that her life is a dream, an illusion before her summer at Grand Isle.
The idea of the soul plays a very important part in the novel. Edna is constantly distracted by frequent bouts of “inward contemplation.” Early on in the novel Edna recognizes that she has lived “a small life all within herself” (Chopin, 35). She knows she has let herself conform, but she also finds herself questioning life and her existence. Grand Isle was the place where these private inhibitions began to stir and wrap around her interest like “foamy wavelets [curling] like serpents around her ankles” (301). These serpent-like wavelets, this temptation, take her on a journey into her soul.
One night at Grand Isle, Edna decides to stay outside on the hammock until late. This decision upsets her husband, Leonce—Edna is a fragile being and needs rest—according to him. But this resistance does not faze Edna. Instead she resists her husband’s request to go inside. This stirs something in her; “[she] began to feel like one who awakens gradually out of a dream, a delicious, grotesque, impossible dream, to feel again the realities pressing int...