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Essay on The Awakening by Kate Chopin
In The Awakening by Kate Chopin human freedom seems to be what is at the center of things. The attainment of this freedom, it is implied in this novel, will be accompanied by the blessed disappearance of politics. Perhaps it is the evidence of this dislike for politics exemplified in The Awakening that causes some critics to label it neither feminist nor political. Of course, others apply to it either the first of these adjectives or both. Approaching The Awakening as a feminist novel reveals as much about it as looking upon it as a novel written by a southern wife and mother of six and prods speculation as to the interrelationships among Kate Chopin's thinking, writing, and biography. The modern perplexity regarding the concepts of unity and fragmentation appears in The Awakening in Chopin's attack on societal imposition of human roles. Edna's unified life as a wife and mother is tied to her role-playing; with freedom comes fragmentation. The Awakening is not written in a fragmented form nor does Chopin make use of multiple narrators. It does deal, however, with the ideological themes of fragmentation and unity which are stylistically developed in later feminist novels.
The ending of The Awakening, a crux in Chopin criticism generally, is also central to a discussion of the frequent escape and/or death endings encountered in the feminist novel. Finally, Chopin's use of imagery highlights later practices. Like other twentieth-century feminist novels, The Awakening is infused with a host of symbolic meanings. Edna's marriage, her children, and her own awakened sexuality are much more than the experiences of one woman's life. (Alfred Kazin, 1942, p. 154).
As much as Chopin may dislike ideologues and distrust authoritarianism, she chooses to write The Awakening in the third person and to permit herself as the author to comment on her characters.....
