Article Critique of The Awakening
1.
In Katie Chopin’s The Awakening, Edna is referred to as “his wife” or “Mrs.
of married women of the time, Edna is an extension of her husband, and has no thoughts
or actions independent of him or her role as wife and mother. When she is relieved of the
burden of living day to day with a husband and children, Edna has the freedom from
bondage to experience an awakening of her own when she becomes the focus of her own
thoughts and reflections. As though an inner light was beginning to glow, a feeling
unfamiliar and foreign to her, she has a realization in her re-examination of her own life
of where she came from, where she is, and where she wants to go from here.
2.
The narrator is not omniscient, therefore we are not privy to “information,
feelings, or facts that are outside the ‘consciousness’” of Edna (100). The narrator is
detached, however we are afforded access to Edna’s feelings and experiences which is
innovative on Chopin’s part.
3.
The end of The Awakening is innocuous and we are left (I feel) with a sense of not
knowing if Edna is suicidal or is just trying to invoke the essence of a sensually
encompassing seduction and is enfolded into the sea.
4.
Critics of Chopin’s time would have called the novel’s ending as obscene as,
again, the sea is seen as a sexually implied entity, enfolding Edna in its embrace-like
waves, surrounding and entering all exterior parts of her body. It conforms to her body,
seduces her, and pulls her in. Chopin’s writings do not wax nostalgically for the old
South, but figuratively hold a mirror up to what was wrong with the old ways and incites
them to look beyond, anticipating what is to come, and criticism of what needed to
change.
