Edna Pontellier: Selfish, Adulterous, and Suicidal
In the eighteen hundreds, life was very different from today. There were no televisions, washing machines, modern cooking ranges, or any modern appliance. Overall, life was much more difficult then than it is today. In these times, there were certain gender roles to which each respective sex had to adhere. There are certain gender roles even today, but these have evolved since earlier times. For example, in the 1800 's, women were expected to be the quintessential mother woman. They were expected to run the household, take care of the children, and adore the husband. The husband however, was expected to go out and work to provide for his wife and children. While these gender roles may seem unfair and stereotypical to a person today, they were a result of societal evolution, just like the roles further evolved to what they are today. Kate Chopin was born in 1851, and lived a mostly fortunate childhood, growing up exposed to many arts. She married at seventeen, and was a graduate. Her husband gave her much freedom to do what she pleased, and she utilized that freedom to become an author. She had six children by 1881, and she wrote The Awakening in 1899. Most of her writings had a slight feminine theme to them, for example, literary critic Patricia Bradley uses the example "the bird imagery Chopin uses to set the opening scene in The Awakening
to similar uses in George Bernard Shaw 's feminist essay "The Womanly Woman"" (Bradley 40). There is also a theme in Chopin 's writing, according to author Allen Stein that wives fail to find fulfillment in their marriages, and then are driven to adultery, desertions and suicide (Stein 357). The Awakening was not received well by the public however, and she eventually quit writing because of this. After that she dedicated herself to her family for the rest of her life, which ended the second of August, 1934. The novel The Awakening was about a woman who decided not to conform to the norms of society, and she
Cited: Bradley, Patricia L. "The Birth of Tragedy and The Awakening: Influences and Intertextualities." Southern Literary Journal 37.2 (2005): 40-62. Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Gray, Jennifer B. "The Escape of the Sea: Ideology and The Awakening." Southern Literary Journal 37.1 (2004): 53-74. Pizer, Donald. "A note on Kate Chopin 's The Awakening as naturalistic fiction." Southern Literary Journal 33.2 (2001): 5-14. Stein, Allen. ""Kate Chopin 's "A Pair of Silk Stockings": The Marital Burden and the Lure of Consumerism." The Mississippi Quarterly 57.3 (2004): 357