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The Awakening Edna Character Analysis

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Character Analysis: Robert Robert, though gone for most of the novel, is the driving force of The Awakening. It is known from when he is introduced that Robert is a flirt. He picks a woman every summer and falls in 'love' with her. He is young, but not necessarily innocent. Robert understands what he is doing when he flirts with the women every summer. He also knows where the line is between flirting and being inappropriate with married women is and he likes to mess with it. Robert is the reason Edna's awakening happens. He is the reason the whole plot of The Awakening happens. Without him life for Edna would have gone on like normal. His actions towards Edna are one of the causes of her death. Robert also shows to readers that a fantasy never works out. Aside from Edna, he is the most important character in making The Awakening the story it is. Robert breaks down Edna's innocence and breaks her out of her shell. He let's her see what is actually right in front of …show more content…

His time is spent mostly with Edna. Edna is also the first woman Robert has real feelings for and is not just playing around with. He sweeps Edna off her feet with his flirting. That is one reason he leaves for Mexico. He know it is wrong for him to have such strong feelings for Edna and for her to have the same feelings. However, he can't keep the feelings hidden and comes home. In the end, he leaves her. Which shows the biggest difference between Edna and Robert. Edna, in her awakening, sees change and hope. Robert leaves because he believes nothing can change. That him and Edna can never be together. He leaves her one last note and goes. Edna doesn't drown herself because of Robert, though Robert helped her decide to do it. He opened her eyes and Edna sees this awful world she is apart of. She drowns not because she is heartbroken of Robert, but because Robert stands for the choice she'll never get and love she'll never

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There was three parts of this book which involved Robert Ross and sexual occurrences. After analyzing the three parts it is prevalent that Robert was a character whom felt very uncomfortable when put in a situation where sexual intercourse is present. Using the critical approaches Archetypal as well as Psychoanalytical his feelings are shown through various symbols, patterns, and actions. From a historical- biographical approach you could relate the tone during the sexual occurrences to the author, Timothy Findley’s personal life. Timothy Findley was openly homosexual (Duffy) which can shadow why the character felt so uncomfortable about mixed gender sexual intercourse.

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Kate Chopin's The Great Awakening explains how Edna Pontellier, an everyday woman of the nineteenth century, opens up and explores herself. A majority of the important characters in her story are the men in Edna's life. Men like Leonce, Robert, and Alcee all are key pieces to her awakening. They all influence Edna in their own ways. Leonce Pontellier is a controlling husband and an all around materialistic man.

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Taking into consideration that Robert can only speak to what people tell him and is unable to read body language, is also a key factor in his characterization. In view of the fact that Robert has an outgoing personality it is clear that has thrown a wrench in the narrator's sense of security and caused a rift between his wife. “When we first started going out together, she showed me the poem. In the poem, she recalled his fingers and the way they had moved around over her face. In the poem, she talked about what she had felt at the time, about what went through her mind when the blind man touched her nose and lips” (1-2).

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The narrator finally understands how Robert can love a woman or even just eat dinner being blind, since looking is not as important as he once thought. The townspeople were also just as wrong about Miss. Emily. When Emily dies, the townspeople are let into

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The other reason makes Edna realize her own self is swimming, as if a release to her. Refer to what she said in the novel, to beyond other women, it can express that her aspiration on being alternative and get rid of the constraint from the society. Also that is the first body contact with Robert, she find herself in the ocean, and there is the place she longing, also aware of the freedom. Robert, is a boy she falls in love with, yet she aware of that, if she marries to Robert, her future just same as now, she will lose her freedom.

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He, unlike Edna, cannot escape the confines of society as Edna is still married to Leonce, a fact that he is well aware of. Edna has embraced her awakening and has rejected societal norms; however, Roberts’s unreciprocated love serves as a sign to Edna that she is truly alone in her awakening. The relationship between Edna and Robert serves as a constant reminder that Edna is still confined by social

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Mr. Pontellier takes great pride in his household possessions, including Edna, so as his wife, she is obligated to perform her duties that are expected of her, which limits her free-will. After Edna and Leonce return to their home in New Orleans, Mr. Pontellier inspects his house, insuring that everything is in its rightful place.

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From the beginning of the novel the narrator shows ignorance and prejudice towards Robert, he is fighting with his own of jealousy and insecurity. Being unhappy with his own life, the narrator sees Robert as a possible threat to his usual evening with pot and TV, without realizing that in order to be satisfied he should step out of his habitual

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After swimming successfully, she develops feelings for Robert. After this awakening, Edna starts to step back and rethink her entire life; her marriage, her role, and even herself. She realizes she feels sort of imprisoned in this life she has had for so long. Edna finally starts doing things for her, she is letting herself feel an attraction for another man even though she is married and she also gets into art and has everyone in the house model for her. Rather than doing things to get the house ready for her husband or spending time playing with her children, she is distracted by all her newly found

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Her frequent vacations to the island, like her frequent dips into the ocean, begin to spark a personal change within the woman. A Creole man, Robert, shows Edna a new dimension of feelings she never knew she lived without, and she begins to look through life through a new lens. Having been awakened for the first time, she sees injustice and mistreatment where she saw none before. Chopin uses Edna’s new observations and reactions to the culture around her to illustrate the myriad ways women were marginalized. In an ironic twist, the white woman from Kentucky proves to be more liberated than her more traditional husband, who grew up

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No multitude of words could have been more significant than these moments of silence , or more pregnant with the first felt throbbing of desire” (Pg. 30) the sexual impulses that had once died down first became awakened at this point of the novel. Edna Pontellier resurrected the optimistic view of lovemaking once more, but is usually never cognizant of the actions she commits. Ednas sexual awakening is split into two parts, emotionally and physically. Edna Pontelliers emotional sexual awakening is brought to life by the hands of Robert. When Robert leaves her the first time, she is upset, unable to believe he left so abruptly, and without saying goodbye.

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For starters, Robert compares himself to how everyone might be feeling by bringing up the fact that he lost a member of his family to a murderer too. This gave people the impression that they were not alone and that Robert had similar emotions to them. A final way Robert makes the reader care is by telling them to do certain things like pray for Martin’s family and the country. Some rhetorical devices used by Robert in his speech were repetition, antithesis, and epistrophe. Repetition is used in the words “we” and “love.”

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If he were to say, ‘Here, Robert, take her and be happy; she is yours,’ I should laugh at the both of you” (108). Throughout the story Edna’s feelings for Robert grow stronger and deeper, so that by the end of the novel she simply longs to be with him. Yet parallel to that growth Edna has discovered her self and developed her own identity. The idea of a transfer of ownership of her person from one man to another is abhorrent to her, so much so that it would cause her to abandon her dream of being with Robert. Though she wants that very much, she is unwilling to lose her own identity in the process as she did when she was with Mr. Pontellier.

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Edna’s marriage to Leonce “was purely an accident, in this respect resembling many other marriages which masquerade as the decrees of Fate. It was in the midst of her secret great passion that she met him. He fell in love, as men are in the habit of doing, and pressed his suit with an earnestness and ardor which left nothing to be desired” (Chopin 18). As Edna’s awakening develops, she begins to act out of character, driven by her inward desires. She starts spending more and more time with Robert, and while Leonce is aware, he pays no attention to the affair.

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This novel, The Awakening, is about a woman named Edna Pontellier learns to think of herself as an independent human being. Also, Edna Pontellier refuses to obey against the social norms by leaving her husband Leónce Pontellier and having an affair with Robert Lebrun. Kate Chopin describes societal expectations and the battle of fitting the mold of motherhood in the Awakening by how Edna Pontellier and Adele Ratignolle contribute to their family in different ways. Edna Pontellier’s attitude toward motherhood is that she is not a perfect mother-women. Adele Ratignolle’s attitude toward motherhood is that she is a perfect mother-women.

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