Summary:
Essay explores Kate Chopin's views of Victorian women.
The Victorian age was one of great elegance and delicacy. The elite society was formed by few rich, polished and decorous people. The women were expected to be subtle, quiet and completely devoted to their husband and children. A woman's goal in life was to marry an important rich man and have many offsprings. Through The Awakening, Kate Chopin criticizes society's perception of what a woman should be by making her heroine a free spirited, independent woman. "He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. If it was not a mother's place to look after children, whose on earth was it"" Chapter 3, pg. 7
Victorian age women spend their life taking care of their family and leaving their personal aspirations at the end of their priorities. The complete dependence the Victorian women have on their husband and the imperative happiness of their children makes them loose focus of their own wellbeing.
"The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshipped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels." Chapter 4, pg. 10
On the contrary, Edna sees her life as a slavery, where her dreams and feelings are not valued and even ignored. The heroine longs for independence, freedom, self-expression and a place she can call her own. Edna's beliefs and ideas differ from those of a typical Victorian woman. She sometimes forgets her duties as a mother and feels that her children are part of the chains that keep her tied to a patriarchal society.
The author of The Awakening, Kate Chopin, considers the status of women of her time as an unjust one that limited the future of the female population. By Edna being the protagonist of the novel, the reader sees the society's discrimination trough her eyes and the author can send a message with the images of inequality between man and women.
The novelist's ideas are clearly divisive in the time it was written, because it presented the bizarre idea that women could be more than a house-wife. Chopin was definitely a modern woman in Victorian times that wrote an incredible literary work that depicts the social value and repression of Victorian women.
This is the complete article, containing 405 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
