THE CONTROVERSIAL IDEAS OF EDNA PONTELLIER IN KATE CHOPIN’S THE AWAKENING

Abstract

In America, the 1890s were a decade of tension and social change. In its origin, American feminism was at the verge of a social reform, and the term abolitionism was on the walls of movements including socialism and the establishment of public schools. A milieu of names emerged female writing in American realism and naturalism - among them Emily Dickinson and Kate Chopin. A central theme in Kate Chopin’s fiction was the independence of women. In Louisiana, most women were their husband’s property. The codes of Napoleon were still governing the matrimonial contract. Since Louisiana was a Catholic state, divorce was rare and scandalous. In any case, Edna Pontellier of Kate Chopin in The Awakening (1899) had no legal rights for divorce, even though Léonce undoubtedly did. When Chopin gave life to a hero that tested freedom’s limits, she touched a nerve of the politic body. However, not Edna’s love, nor her artistic inner world, sex, or friendship can reconcile her personal growth, her creativity, her own sense of self and her expectations. It is a very particular academic fashion that has had Edna transformed into some sort of a feminist heroine. If she could have seen that her awakening, in fact, was a passion for Edna herself, then perhaps her suicide would have been avoided. Everyone was forced to observe, including the cynics that only because a young female showed interest in a young man that was not her husband, what need was there to argue this female who all her life had lain coldly asleep. Edna sees herself as a possession of her husband and even as imprisoned by her children. The whole tension gave rise to contradicting the reality, to pushing oneself to limits because what was proclaimed to be “neat” and “appropriate” was now the fissure to the accepted norms of a society. In this paper, we will preset Edna’s controversial ideas as she awakens and captivates that the fissure is becoming more and more unfathomable. Throughout the analysis of these ideas and Edna’s character, we will bring light into the unquestionable role of Kate Chopin in signing the path to the modern woman writing in American novel of the beginning of the 20th century.