How free is free? The purpose of realism in the 1800s was to get people’s attention. The authors did that by relating to real life situations or adding in things people wanted or needed. For example, Frederick Douglass wrote My bondage And my freedom and Kate Chopin wrote “ The story of an hour”.
Thesis- In The Awakening, Kate Chopin utilizes symbolic imagery to illustrate Edna’s inability to truly break from society, perpetuating her circular growth. 1)Hammock Scene Portraying Edna’s weakening resolve during her first attempts to break from society, the poster illustrates a breaking rope. Constantly limiting by society, she has experienced oppressed her entire life, causing a deep desire to escape to form an identity.
Is suicide ever the answer? Even though suicide is a permanent solution to temporary problems, sometimes it’s the only sense of control that a person has left over their own life. The protagonist of Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening”, Edna Pontellier, disobeys completely the paradigms that defined her society set in the 19th century. In an era where women were oppressed and expected to give themselves to their families, Edna failed to find a place in that society and escaped by means of suicide. Society is a strong force that molded Edna as a woman, but through her suicide, she was finally able to escape its grasp.
In conclusion, Greenblatt states that culture is defined as a collection of infinite guidelines and regulations that people within a society follow. These guidelines and regulations are, however, inconsequential without cultural boundaries and limitations. In The Awakening Kate Chopin conveys how the novel strikes in opposition to society’s standards through the characters of Edna Pontellier and Robert Lebrun.
Chopin wants the reader to realize that in her time, women were stereotyped in a male dominated society. After hearing about her husband’s passing, Mrs. Mallard began to have a sense of peacefulness coming from the outside world. This doesn’t mean that she was happy about the death of her husband, but she felt a newfound independence. Stereotypically, married women were considered to be housewives during the early 1900s. Women were told by their husbands what to do because in those times it was believed that men had higher authority than women.
Sin is a misconceived word with a scattered definition. To me, sin means knowingly doing wrong, but Dictionary.com defines sin as, “any act regarded as such a transgression, especially a willful or deliberate violation of some religious or moral principle.” Sin is different in every part of the world, different cultures, religions, individual’s convictions, governments, societies, we’re all different. William Shakespeare said, “Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.” The best exemplifications of this quote can be found in The Awakening by Kate Chopin and I am Malala by Malala Yousafzai.
In 1899, the publishing year of Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening”, a woman’s sexuality was kept hidden and was only for the bedroom. Women wore long dress that touched the floor, and were ridiculed if they showed even the slightest bit of ankle. The role that women played in this time period was that housewife and mother. They were to keep their husbands happy, cook, clean, and take care of the children. Edna’s provincial life leads her to try to find an escape from the world’s constricting views of women.
In “Culture” by Stephen Greenblatt, it explains that culture is the “beliefs and practices that from a given culture function as a persuasive technology of control, a set of limits… to which individuals must conform.” Greenblatt’s idea of culture is explaining that in some cases in books there is cultural constraints, which is all based upon their society and how the role of men and women are expected to be and it is most times, although not all, passed from generation to generations. Some works of art go on to “ batter against the boundaries of their own culture to record the voice of the displaced and oppressed.” In The Awakening by Kate Chopin, the protagonist, Edna Pontellier doesn’t fit into Greenblatt’s definition of Culture, but the
There are few stories of Chopins which do not foreground language. Language makes the main body of a text. When used correctly it can be manipulated to present certain themes. Throughout the novel, ‘The Awakening’ by Kate Chopin, the language used in the text conveys the struggles of the main character to find her own identity. The way Chopin uses dialogue, a secret language and the narrator’s descriptions relate to the theme of identity, and often places it subtly at the centre of the reader’s consciousness.
The author Kate Chopin is a woman born in the 1800’s who wrote about the individuality of women and understanding a woman’s viewpoint during this time. Women in the 19th century were not culturally and economically accepted, wherefore they were thought as property to be owned by anyone who pleases. An analysis of Chopin’s, “Ripe Figs” will show the use of theme through patience, freedom, and maturity by relating the maturity process to the seasons of the year and the ripening of the figs. The first theme that Kate Chopin provides an image of is patience.
With the denial of his past and of his race, comes hatred and racism into Armand’s heart and actions. This goes hand and hand with the denial aspect with the usage of characterization from Chopin’s part. Racism ran high in most people’s characteristics of this time because Chopin put this story’s in pre-Civil War times. With the treatment of his slaves, you can really see how Armand feels about others from the race that he sees as less than, even though he is really one of them. The substandard treatment of Armand’s slaves only stops once Desiree gives birth to the baby, but when there was a chance of Desiree being of an African descent, Armand sent her and their child away without thought, saying “Yes, I want to go” with no emotion showing in his voice or actions (3).