the awakening

The novel, The Awakening, by Kate Chopin is set in the late nineteenth century, in Louisiana. This is a place and time for women to submit themselves to the wants and needs of husbands and families. The protagonist, Edna Pontellier, isn’t content with being a mother-woman, one of the ordinary, traditional women who, "...idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it to a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings …showed first 75 words of 1707 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1707 total…nothing for her to do but end her life. If Edna had been born in a different time and had been faced with the same situation, it would have been a different story. works cited Hollister, Michael. “Chopin’s The Awakening.” The Explicator 51.1 (1993) : 90-92 Showalter, Elaine. Sister’s Choice: Tradition and change in American Women’s Writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Spangler, George. “Ways of Interpreting Edna’s Suicide.” Kate Chopin Study Text Online. Neal Wyatt, 1993.