How Does Edna Pontellier's Use Of Gender Inequality In The Awakening

Men: that’s who the world really revolves around. Men have unceasingly been at the top controlling society, treating women as property and fitting them into tight fitting standards. The Awakening by Kate Chopin follows the narrative of Edna Pontellier, at the beginning a housewife property of her husband, but as the novel progresses, she begins to value her individuality and starts to defy these standards put in place for her and all women. The story ends with her demise, drowning in the ocean, as a result of her suicide. Kate Chopin’s The Awakening displays American society as repressive and misogynistic through the use of symbolism, Edna Pontellier’s character development, and her death, all expressing the severity of gender inequality which

Edna Pontellier shows significant character growth and the author utilizes this character growth to show America’s harmful standards. Edna begins as a wife and mother belonging to her husband and to society. Then Edna has an awakening, awakened to society’s unfair treatment of women, succumbing them to live a life molded for them by societal standards. She then strives and yearns for her independence, wanting to live a life molded from herself and not anyone else. As she describes it, “There was with her a feeling of having descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual. Every step which she took toward relieving herself from obligations added to her strength and expansion as an individual,” (Chopin 240). Edna knows that her independence will strike controversy, moving her far down a social scale. Society does not want women knowing who they are- their worth- and the author conveys this through Edna’s self exploration and ownership. By doing this, she is defying the role preselected for her as a woman by American society. However, defying the role can only grant her such a small success if she even

One symbol Chopin uses are birds. Madame Reisz told Edna, beginning to act upon her self ownership, “‘The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings,” (Chopin 211). The strong bird is a symbol of strength and social incline.Through this bird, Kate Chopin displays what it soars over. The repressive society which many women on earth are stuck in. Women at this time are represented by caged bird’s in the main house and not the strong ones that soar. Very few can soar like this bird in an American Society, and at the end Edna cannot soar either and tumults back to earth, in the sea in which she dies in. This sea at grand isle acts as the main symbol in the novel. As Edna longs for the sea describing it as ‘sensuous’ and ‘inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude’ (Chopin 35) she also begins to long for her own freedom. When Edna swims for the first time she thought “She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before,” (Chopin 71). The sea, symbolizing freedom, shows that women are stuck in ownership, in these tight fighting roles set for them, so they can’t and don’t wish to live a life in which they own, a life of solitude, because they would also be living a life of scandal in the eyes of America’s society. While Edna swims she realizes “the stretch of water behind her assumed the aspect of a barrier which her