The Awakening by Kate Chopin: themes and analysis

Men and Quality of Life in the Awakening

The Awakening is a story of one woman's struggle for self-identity. People have often remarked that Chopin defined for her time what it meant to be a woman. Edna, the main protagonist in the Awakening, gives us a glimpse of the inner struggle of women of that time, and how they struggled for independence in a time that fought against such a right. At a vacation resort near the Gulf, Edna begins her awakening and we begin to see that while Edna may blame men for her place in life, it seems that she may be the one creating her own madness, and the one that struggles with love the most.

In the beginning, Edna tries to be good. She tries to be like the traditional Creole woman, caring for her husband and children, and trying hard to be a suitable homemaker. But her husband is controlling and chauvinistic, characteristics that were quite typical of men during this time, and she finds it hard to live with. Although Edna is unhappy with the state of her marriage, she conceals her feelings for quite some time until she's unable to take it anymore. She decides to have a sexual relationship with another man to live out her dream, and to exercise her independence. When this fantasy falls apart so does her entire outlook on life because it was so attached to this man, as it was the man before him, her husband. This is when she climbs into the ocean for the only freedom she thinks is possible.

If we look at each of the men in this novel and their relations with Edna, we begin to see a pattern. Kate Chopin portrays the men in her novel as possessive, cowardly and self-serving. She uses the characters of Mr. Pontellier, Robert, Alcee and a few other men to illustrate what a man was and wasn't in those times. Through these men, we are better able to see Edna and how they each contributed to the direction and quality of her life because in the end, it was them that motivated all of her choices, and left her to question her self-identity.

Mr. Pontellier is a man that obviously views women as objects that are owned and used in accord to that belief. A wife is a man's property, he "looks at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of property which has suffered some damage"(44) and his possession, "he greatly valued his possessions, chiefly because they were his"(99). He treats Edna like a child; he commands and instructs her every move. "Send him about his business when he bores you, instructed her husband"(45) while also scolding her "he reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children"(48). This is the behavior that became unbearable to Edna, and the very excuse she used to run to the arms of another man. In spite of the fact that all of her friends were telling her how great her husband was and how good she had it with him.

Alcee Arobin is a character that is completely self-serving, one that uses Edna for his own needs. Edna, and any married woman for that matter, was safe territory for a man like Alcee who feared commitment. He played games with Edna and she allowed it. "His manner was so genuine that it often deceived himself"(132). However, she completely trusts him with some of her innermost thoughts. "I'm going to pull myself together for a while and think-try to determine what character of a woman I am"(137-38). It seems she is reaching out to the person who cares the least for her, because he only cares for himself and nothing about her. "Why bother thinking about it when I can tell you"(138). With Alcee, she puts herself in yet another position to be victimized, another way to send her life in directions that appear out of her control.

Robert is the cowardly man in Edna's life. He is a man who "each summer at Grand Isle had committed himself the devoted attendant of some fair dame of damsel..sometimes a young girl or a widow; but more often as not some interesting married woman"(53). He revels in the fact that Edna is attracted to him, but is cowardly when he comes to feel that love full-force. He shows his cowardly ways in his note "Good-bye -because I love you"(172). Loving Edna would create too many hardships for him so he runs away. Again, she is put in despair by another man because her whole life seems to depend more on their actions and feelings that upon her own. The value of life itself is diminished by the hurt of each man she tangles with.

Edna's unavailability, and the fact that she chooses to surround herself with those who are also quite unavailable, is described in the following passage, in which her friends are discussed: "they seemed to have been all of one type - the self-contained. She never realized that the reserve of her own character had much, perhaps everything, to do with this" (34). Maybe the reason for Edna's unhappiness is because she does not truly know how to give or receive love. She seems to look for it in all the wrong places; she seems to attract these like characters, men that cannot give love any more than she is able to. In this sense, then, all of her relationships were doomed from the very beginning. It was necessary for Edna to get into these relationships in order for her to get closer to herself. In order to see her true capacity for love, she had to see it again and again in someone else, and be hurt by their limited capacity for it.