How Does Kate Chopin Use Water Symbolism In The Awakening

“The Awakening” by Kate Chopin, is a book about a woman who attempts a self discovery in a world where women are expected to orient themselves around their family. The main character, Edna, is a woman in Louisiana who lives a lavish lifestyle with her bussinessman husband and her two children. She spends most her life in a self proclaimed fog, going on with life, not particularly happy, but not miserable either. It is only until one day that she is swimming that she discovers there is a whole side of her that she hasn’t explored. Throughout the book, Edna discoveres herself and her place in society by having an affair, moving out, and participating in the arts such as painting. She struggles to achieve what she really wants, orienting her life

The author, Kate Chopin, uses symbols throughout the story to support Edna’s transformation and represent feminism and how a woman orients herself to the world. Chopin uses water to represent feedom and escape, as well as a woman orienting her world towards herself. She uses hands to represent her marital obligations and clothes and a sewing machine to represent duties to children and being a mother.

Kate Chopin eloquently uses water to represent the freedom and fluidity in Edna’s life when she orients life to herself, and defies the limits on women by doing what she wants to do. The author used the symbol of the sea to represent Edna’s awakening and orienting her world towards herself, by having the awakening there in the first place, and then later taking her life back as a last resort. At the beginning of the story, Edna first begins to have stirred feelings when she learns to swim. In an essay written by Jagielska, Anna Marie, and Małgorzata Godlewska, the text states, “The novel offers an explanation to Edna’s attitude suggesting her attempts to counteract the stereotypes about women: ‘She [Edna] wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before’ [Chopin, 1976, p. 32]”(Jagielska, Anna Marie, Małgorzata Godlewska 67). The sea allows Edna to resist the expectations that women have in

When Edna returns from the beach at the beginning of the story, her husband is disturbed to see his wife burnt from the sun. But he is not worried for her health or comfort, he is worried for his own sake because he sees her as a possession. He doesn’t want others to see her burnt and think that he lets her do whatever she wants and doesn’t control her. In response to his remark, Edna holds up her hands and looks at the part of her body that her husband is objectifying. In her essay, Mary Stange wrote, “In the context of the property system in which Edna exists as a sign of value, Edna’s body is detachable and alienable from her own viewpoint: the hands and wrists are part of the body yet can be objectified, held out and examined as if they belonged to someone else - as indeed, in some sense that Leonce insists upon very literally, they do belong to someone else”(Stange 275). Leonce is bothered that Edna’s body is burnt because he sees her as his possession, and like she isn’t taking care of his possession. Edna’s hands are just one part of the body that is being seen as possessed by him. Her hands represent the control and possession that Leonce has over her as dictated by Victorian society. Women were expected to look good and take care of themselves for their husbands to make them look good. Another symbol used by Chopin to represent Edna orienting