The Awakening by Kate Chopin (Feminine Agency) Essay Example
In the mid nineteenth century, feminine agency was a term considered alien to American society due to constricting patriarchal autonomy. For the heroine in Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening, feminine agency is the portrayal of her emergence as a subject of societal patriarchy into an agent of her own free will. The title of the novel is a significant symbol of Edna Pontellier’s gradual awakening to the oppressed reality of her existence, thus her self-quest for feminine agency. Before Edna’s ‘awakening’, she is portrayed as a caged bird in the sense that she, living in a constricting oppressive environment, has no other perspective of the world in which she inhabits, but only one of which is greatly influenced by a patriarchal society. It is not until a summer which she spends at Grand Isle where she, upon discovering her love of the Arts and develops a budding relationship with Robert Le Brun, begins a journey of inquisition about her place in the world and starts to rebel against the conformities of society. Ultimately, she comes to the realization that she will never be an agency of her own self and concludes, albeit arguably, to commit suicide as a medium of allowing her true self the freedom to discover agency. Chopin employs key motifs considered to be romantic in nature such as a woman’s awakening to sexuality, sensuality and autonomy to portray the romantic conflict between that of female self-assertion and society. The Romanticism movement is defined as a belief that imagination and emotions are stronger than reason. “A conviction that poetry is superior to science… belief that contemplation of the natural world is a means of discovering a truth that lies behind reality.” (Holt) Classic American authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson with “Self Reliance” and Walt Whitman’s renowned “Songs of myself”, are works of literature prominently associated with literary romanticism and are direct influences of The Awakening. Chopin’s constant quest in her fictions