Internal Conflict In The Awakening

An Unorthodox Woman Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is a romance novel lacking a fairytale ending, and it is about a woman who wanted more out of life than to be someone’s wife or mother, which was a quality unheard of in the 1800s. The story commences at Grand Isle and focuses on Edna Pontellier, spouse to Leonce Pontellier and mother to two young boys, who was content with her life until one fateful summer where she became familiar with a mister Robert Lebrun, a lively entrepreneur known to fancy married women. She fell in love with him during their adventures, and in turn, fell out of love with the mediocrity of her cookie-cutter lifestyle. She compares herself to other domestic goddesses she named “mother women,” (Chopin 16) only to realize …show more content…
Said conflict first appears early on, when Leonce accuses her of neglecting her children for supposedly not noticing one of them had a fever, because after all, “if it was not a mother’s place to look after children, whose on earth was it?” (Chopin 13) Edna proceeds to check on her son, then returns to bed, not uttering a word to her husband. Once he falls asleep, she starts to cry to herself and steps out of the room. On the next page, she denotes that events like that were a common occurrence in her marriage, but then she considers they “never before [have] weighed much against the abundance of her husband’s kindness and a uniform devotion. . .”(14) It is at this moment that she discerns her unhappiness with Leonce, but has not planned on acting upon it. The source of her internal conflict changes as the plot thickens, and its intensity accumulates to the point of her feeling so frustrated that she “tore [a handkerchief] into ribbons”,”flung [her wedding ring] upon the carpet”, then “flung [a glass vase] upon the tiles of the hearth.” (Chopin 87) Her conflict regarding her individuality diminishes near the end of the book when she and Robert are confessing their love for one another and she profoundly clarifies,” I am no longer one of Mr.Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose. If he were to say,’Here …show more content…
Those experiences evolve just as much as she. She was primarily hesitant to learn how to swim, but once she does, she wants to do it independently, without the watchful gaze of her husband. And so she commences to do so. In the shadow of all other events in the book, her time swimming doesn’t appear to be exceedingly important, until the final pages when she returns to Grand Isle in a fit of desperation after Robert abandons her permanently with his heart-dropping words,”Good-by, because I love you.” (Chopin 185). On her revisitation to the place where it all began, she seeks the beach, where she once walked with her vanished lover, and she undresses herself and she enters the water and takes one swim, with the heavy loss of an empty yearning and thoughts of her husband and children and her dear friend, Madame Reisz, who was the origin of her awakening. I had deduced her experiences similar to the Shmoop Editorial Team (but they came up with an addition, insinuating Edna gained empowerment via the sea), and they wrote as follows: “Did Edna get (figuratively) too drunk off empowerment and die? Or is this a deliberately circular choice by Edna, as in, she wanted her life to end where it truly began? I disagree because I solely believe she was returning to where it all originated in order to end her new life because it just