Gender Roles In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

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If Edna Pontellier was highly educated, would she still have chosen suicide as the way out of her impossible awakening? Kate Chopin was an author before her time. Chopin was a pioneer of feminism before it was popular; however, the main character is challenged with a lot of unconventional matters. The Awakening, written in 1899, explores controversial issues during the time period. Throughout the novel female duties stray away from their traditional roles. From promiscuity, motherhood, freedom, and finding one’s personal identity, the main character, Edna, struggles. On the contrary, in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Turned, the main character, Mrs. Marroner is independent. She is educated and teaches at a local college. When she leaves her husband …show more content…
Marroner and Edna even start out in two different scenarios that involve the ocean. Mrs. Marroner was drowning in her life with the news of her husband impregnating another woman. It made her flashback to a time when she literally struggled while swimming, “It brought vaguely to her mind an awful moment in the breakers at York Beach, one summer in girlhood, when she had been swimming underwater and could not find the top” (806). Mrs. Marroner initially struggles with her relationship just like she once did with the ocean. Consequently, while Mrs. Marroner suffers in her relationship, Edna tries to become independent during her encounter in the ocean. Edna learns to wade in the water, “The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace” (571). Edna finds freedom in the ocean. It seems ironic that both of the stories have scenes of the ocean that vary so differently. The way that the characters handled their “ocean” ultimately becomes their destiny. Edna’s new found freedom with the ocean is a permanent freedom, unlike her brief love affair with Robert. Mrs. Marroner’s situation is also temporary, but it does not impact her life the way Enda’s did. Mrs. Marroner’s eventual freedom was not temporary because she was able to start over and survive without her husband, and Edna is not able to. Edna’s freedom would have been able to become more permanent if she had the same resources Mrs. Marroner had. Mrs. …show more content…
Marroner and Mrs. Pontellier’s education levels make them think in different ways. Mrs. Marroner tends to be more of a realist. She does not make things out to what they are not, “Mrs. Marroner was wise enough to know how difficult temptation is to recognize when it comes to the guise of friendship from a source one does not suspect” (810). Mrs. Marroner knows that her husband forced Gerta into nonconsensual relations, and she knows that she is able to leave that in her past. She realizes she was not living the life she intended for herself. Consequently, Edna is a romantic. She often dreams of her life with Robert. During Edna and Robert’s last conversation before he left she told him how she felt independent, “You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting your time dreaming of impossible things when you speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am no longer one of Mr. Pontellier’s possessions to dispose of or not. I give myself where I choose” (646). Edna felt empowered, and she thought she would no longer have to answer to anyone. However, Robert is taken aback by this comment as if he was embarrassed, “His face grew a little white. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked” (646). Maybe that is when Edna realized that if she is in a committed relationship with anyone that he will have to approve of her actions. Up until the end of the novel she was convinced that she would one day be able to live the life that she dreams of. Edna’s other short-lived affair with
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