Awakening In today's culture it is sometimes easy to forget the progress women have made in regards to determining their own future, personal freedom, and changing the definition of their societal roles. Women can run for president, take charge of multi-billion dollar corporations, decide to pursue (or not) motherhood; modern culture embraces feminism and a woman's right to choose. The freedom women have today is inherited through a long series of

Awakening, which might have been more aptly titled, The Sexual Awakening shocked the delicate and rigid sensibilities of Kate Chopin's contemporaries of 1899, although many of those contemporaries were slowly experiencing awakenings of their own. In telling the story of a married woman who begins to realize that she is an individual human being, rather than a nonentity made up of female roles assigned by a male-dominated society, Chopin immediately

Kate Chopin, author of "The Story of an Hour" Kate Chopin was born Kate O'Flaherty in 1850, in St. Louis, Missouri (Clarke 1). Chopin's mother was of French extraction and the young Kate grew up in a bilingual household. Chopin's household was also bicultural, encompassing both the cultures of north and south: both supporters of slavery and anti-slavery advocates lived in Missouri; Chopin's family kept slaves and her half-brother fought on

Awakening by Kate Chopin In "The Awakening", Chopin portrays a character, Edna Pontellier, who has identity issues with the traditional gender norms that are present in the Victorian society of the time. Edna is described in ways that would not fulfill the traditional feminine stereotype of the period, and that she is not content with the roles that she plays as a wife and mother. The author ascribes to Edna traits

It is Edna who achieves both the awakening of the title, the awareness of how the social traditions imposed on her are stifling her and preventing her from expressing herself as she would wish, and also fails in that she cannot overcome these traditions and so chooses suicide rather than continue under such a repressive system. Chopin implies that there is a danger in awakening, in understanding the nature of

The figures that, during the novel, have the greatest role in shaping Edna Pontellier's character, and therefore the figures from whom she must escape, are her husband and children. It is her role as wife and mother that is supposed to define her, as it did for much of recorded history. Women were thought to have very little value outside of the home, especially in the higher classes (when it