Attitudes Toward Motherhood In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

In The Awakening by Kate Chopin, she uses attitudes towards motherhood to convey a contrast in Madame Ratignolle and Edna Pontellier’s mothering techniques. In this book, Chopin describes that women are only useful for marriage, having kids, cooking, cleaning, and other sexist roles. A perfect woman was seen as someone who “worships” their husbands and caters to all. The women’s main goals in life would to be married and have children, and if this did not happen they were seen in society as nothing and that they did not reach their expectation as women. Edna’s rebel towards these expectations allow her to live the life she wants and to find herself. On the contrary, Adele follows these expectations which have taken over her life, she has been told what to do, with no questions asked, and she moves through life.

In the beginning of the book, Edna fits in with society but she is unhappy with it. She decides to break away from society’s expectations, she sends her kids to live with their grandmother while she goes off and has an affair. Edna goes about her independence the wrong way, she does so in a selfish manner, abandoning her kids and husband, she even isolates herself from the majority of society. She was by no means a mother woman, she chose to

She wishes that Adele could know the same uplifting feeling and self discovery that Edna had experienced on Grande Isle. Edna sees Adele’s decision of being a mother-woman and all for the children as that of being a prisoner. Adele is the more domestic person of the two, as she makes clothes for her children and she embraces the life of being a mother. On the other hand, Edna doesn’t reciprocate these feelings, she wants to escape the constraints of domesticity and motherhood. After she loosens ties with her own family, she bypasses her friendship with Adele because she now has very little in common with Madame