Edna Pontellier Research Articles

Exploring the Hero's Journey in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist

This research paper explores the quest journeys of the protagonists in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist using Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey from The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The study highlights how the archetypal quest myth is presented in modern narratives. Edna Pontellier in The Awakening embarks on a journey of self-discovery, challenging societal norms and seeking personal freedom. Santiago in The Alchemist follows a more traditional hero’s path, driven by a recurring dream to find a hidden treasure, ultimately realizing that the true treasure lies within. Both journeys lead to significant personal transformations, though their outcomes differ dramatically. While Santiago's journey aligns with the classic structure of departure, initiation, and return, Edna's quest highlights the constraints of her societal context, leading to a tragic conclusion. Santiago encounters physical and spiritual trials in the desert, guided by mentors like Melchizedek and the Alchemist, and returns home enlightened. Conversely, Edna, influenced by characters like Mademoiselle Reisz and Robert Lebrun, faces internal and societal conflicts that ultimately lead her to seek freedom in death. This comparative study illustrates how modern narratives adapt and reinterpret the Hero’s Journey to explore diverse themes and experiences. It emphasizes the enduring relevance of Campbell's monomyth in understanding the complexities of human struggles and aspirations, showing how both protagonists, despite their different paths, reflect universal quests for identity and self-fulfillment. The paper underscores the impact of societal constraints on personal freedom and the varied outcomes of such quests in different cultural contexts.

Edna's Struggle Against Oppressions in The Awakening

This study explores Edna Pontellier's struggle against societal oppressions in Kate Chopin's novel, The Awakening. Edna's quest for self-discovery and liberation from the constraints of late 19th-century societal norms is analyzed through the lens of feminist perspectives. This paper argues that Edna's unconventional behavior signifies a profound challenge to patriarchal norms, emphasizing her pursuit of identity and autonomy. Edna emerges as a symbol of resistance against societal expectations, seeking personal freedom amidst oppressive forces. Furthermore, the study explores the influence of characters like Adele Ratignolle and Mademoiselle Reisz on Edna's journey, highlighting contrasting paths of womanhood and autonomy.

An Analysis of the Image of Edna Pontellier in The Awakening from the Perspective of Feminism

Kate Chopin occupies an important place in the history of female literature. She is the forerunner of feminist literature. The Awakening is Kate’s one of the most famous works, which is about a dissatisfied wife’s resistance to her husband and society. This paper, mainly from the feminist perspective, analyzes and interprets Edna’s main characters in Kate’s The Awakening. First, it introduces Kate’s feminist thought, and the historical and cultural background of her works. Then from the feminist point of view, the thesis analyzes the heroine’s identities as wife, mother, and self, and how to pursue her independence, and she was not accepted by the society and finally went to her doom. No individual can exist independently of social rules. We are the representatives of social culture. Chopin’s work challenges the patriarchal social order through the heroine.

CONFLICT WITH SOCIETAL GENDER ROLES: A COMPARATIVE FEMINIST ANALYSIS OF EDNA PONTELLIER AND NORA HELMER

Kate Chopin, an American novelist and short story writer representing women’s revolt against patriarchal rule, positions women in the center of her works. She deals with women's experiences in the context of gender roles, their conflicts with society, their discovery of their own bodies and the following awakening. Henrik Ibsen is one of the most important writers of Norwegian drama. Similarly, Ibsen highlights the individual's conflict with society as a kind of alienation on the axis of individual-society antagonism. Edna Pontellier, the protagonist in Chopin's novel The Awakening (1899), and Nora Helmer in Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's House (1879), do not fit into the gender roles imposed on them by their societies. Both characters gain self-awareness through the discovery of their uniqueness. Henrik Ibsen and Kate Chopin wrote realistically about the problems their female characters encountered in the patriarchal social structure and their conflicts with social codes. The lives and choices of Edna and Nora, who both have the duties of pleasing their spouses, meeting the needs of the house and taking care of their children within the encompassing structure of the institution of marriage, are similar to each other. In this article, the lives of Edna and Nora, who are the objects of the patriarchal structure in the triangular relationship of man - child - family, will be examined comparatively in terms of their contradictions with society, their journey to self-discovery, their alienation and choices.

EDNA’S AWAKENING: A JOURNEY FROM SLAVERY TO FREEDOM AND TO DESTRUCTION

The oppressed and suppressed female figure in a male-dominated society has been a case of debate since the beginning of human history. Although it is unfortunate that women and men experience the imposed duties inevitably, what and why they are obliged to do is a topic of controversy. Traditionally, men go to work, earn money, whereas women stay at home, take care of the house, and look after of children. The reason why such daily routines are regarded as a customary task is religious morality and culture in the background of society. Kate Chopin deals with the situation of the female figure in The Awakening. There, Edna Pontellier, the female protagonist of the novel, is depicted as a dynamic character, who gradually becomes aware of the dictates of the society represented by her husband and family institution. She has children to look after, a husband to satisfy, a house to take care of, and a patriarchal society to serve. In this article, the case of Edna is examined with a view to gender roles, especially defined according to Third Wave Feminism.

EXPLORING FEMALE IDENTITY IN KATE CHOPIN’S NOVELS

This study delves into the profound exploration of female identity in the works of Kate Chopin, focusing on key novels such as "The Awakening" and "The Story of an Hour." Through a meticulous analysis of Chopin's characters, themes, and narrative techniques, this research sheds light on the complexities of female identity, autonomy, and self-discovery in a patriarchal society.By closely examining the characters of Edna Pontellier and Louise Mallard, this study reveals the depth of complexity in Chopin's portrayal of women who defy societal norms and grapple with the tensions between personal desires and societal expectations. Themes of autonomy, agency, and the quest for self-realization emerge as central motifs in Chopin's exploration of female identity, inviting readers to contemplate the challenges faced by women seeking to define themselves outside of traditional roles.Drawing upon literary criticism, historical context, and feminist theory, this research offers a comprehensive analysis of how Kate Chopin's novels challenge and redefine traditional notions of female identity. Through a nuanced examination of female characters' struggles, aspirations, and triumphs, this study highlights the enduringrelevance of Chopin's works in inspiring conversations about gender, autonomy, and the complexities of female identity in literature and society.

“The Voice of the Sea Speaks to the Soul“: Voicing Silence in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and in Rebecca Migdal’s Graphic Adaptation

This article examines Kate Chopin’s second novel, The Awakening, in conjunction with a graphic novel of this work developed by Rebecca Migdal in The Graphic Canon, Vol. 3 and aims to study the use of silences in Chopin’s novel and the graphic version. This analysis examines non-linguistic communication presented in Chopin’s novel in the figure of her literary alter ego, Edna Pontellier. The methodological framework of this investigation draws on intermedial semiotics with the aim of discussing the use of the literary resource of silence as a visual communicating device in Chopin’s cornerstone of feminist literature The Awakening.

Understanding Life and Death Meaning through the Character of Edna Pontelier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening

A character is a significant part in a tale who has its own personality or traits. Some variables, such as genes and environment, impact the development of a character's personality. Though Psychological approach, the researcher examines the personality development of the main character of Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. From analyzing the character development, the researcher finds that the character of Edna Pontellier has changed and developed from being acceptance toward herself and her life to be rebellious in the search of her independence. The development of Edna’s character also changes the point of view of life and death. Edna feels happy, but in contrast, she feels something missing in her life. Edna feels that she does not belong to any community. She also feels that the world does not support her. That is one of the reasons why she chooses death as a way to find another happiness.

Achieving Humanity through Animality: A Study of the Birds in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

ABSTRACT Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening explores the interconnection between animality and humanity by means of various bird metaphors. In the novel, Edna Pontellier’s ‘evolutionary’ self-perception of birds, namely, ‘the caged parrot’, ‘the pigeon’ and ‘the flying bird’, not only signifies the unshackling of her animality through the arousal of innate animal instinct, but also embodies the establishing of her subjectivity as a human being. Illuminated by animality studies, this article argues that Edna’s awakened animality is essentially her realisation of humanity, which not only breaks through the human-animal dichotomy underlying anthropocentric ideology, but also disrupts the man-woman dichotomy underlying patriarchal ideology. Thus, Edna’s multi-dimensional awakening is conducive to promoting gender equality in the current post-human context.

Nudity and Nakedness: The Gaze of Edna Pontellier

The description of Edna Pontellier’s unclothed body is a recurring metaphor in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. The correlation between nudity and nakedness implies a different status of how a person surveys himself, and is surveyed by others. Moreover, the tradition of men as the surveyor and women as the surveyed shapes the social expectation of women always striving to please the male gaze. Chopin’s Creole society is a sphere where women are surveyed and disciplined. This essay aims to demonstrate how Edna achieved an extraordinary awakening of how women are appraised by men and how they perfect their manners accordingly, under the inspiration of art and the ocean. This awakening is both liberating and detrimental for Edna, for she found only the incompatibility between her quest for selfhood and society. This discordance deepens Edna Pontellier’s solitude and leads to her final suicide. However, the physical destruction is not an act of surrender because, through her nudity, we witness powerful feminist awakening and rebellion.

The Analysis of Conflict in The Awakening by Kate Chopin

This paper mainly examines the conflict in the text. Kate Chopin is a famous American woman novelist in the late 19th century who creates a lot of short stories and novels. The famous novel The Awakening is her masterpiece. Edna Pontellier is the heroine in this novel, whose heart is full of conflict when searching for selfhood. The conflict of the heroine lies in her choice in the role model, her nature, her love and her awakening. Not only the heroine’s conflict but also the conflict between the Creole culture and the Victorian culture illustrated in the text of The Awakening reflects Kate Chopin’s conflict in creating her works. The social background and her personal experience are the root reasons which contribute to Chopin’s conflict characterization in her writing. (Paichai University)

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian Dichotomy in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

Human nature is a thorny topic that triggers a myriad of discussions all over the world. In this regard, researchers endeavor to understand human behavior as a result of rational or emotional impulses. Accordingly, this article attempts to diagnose the controlling power of human nature in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and the real cause of the characters’ downfall from Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical ideas. Hence, the analysis reveals that some characters’ behavior, like the protagonist Edna Pontellier and Victor Lebrun, is controlled by emotional Dionysian impulses; while, the behavior of Léonce Pontellier, Robert Lebrun, Mademoiselle Reisz and Adèle Ratignolle reflects rational Apollonian tendencies. Yet, most of the characters fail to make a balance between Apollonian and Dionysian characteristics that led to their tragic downfall inasmuch as the best life, for Nietzsche, demonstrates the combination of both Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. Therefore, human life is based on the harmony between Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies.

New Orleans Coffee in The Awakening: The Legacy of Rose Nicaud

New Orleans Coffee in <i>The Awakening</i>: The Legacy of Rose Nicaud

『미들마치』와 『각성』: 이타적 봉사와 ‘진정한 자아’

In this article, I apply a feminist lens to study the two heroines, Dorothea Brooke of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72) and Mrs. Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” (1899). The two heroines each pursue intellectual fulfillment and desire to find their “true selves” in patriarchal nineteenth-century society. In marrying 45-year-old pastor Casaubon, Dorothea, like a modern Saint Teresa, seeks to achieve self-fulfillment through her husband, but, eventually frustrated with his monochrome and stuffy life, marries Will Ladislaw after Casaubon’s death. Chopin’s Edna, on the other hand, achieves her true self only through rejecting an identity based solely on her roles as mother and wife. First, she purchases a small house with her own money, thereby gaining both psychological and economic independence. However, realizing that she can neither live with her husband nor run away with Robert, she ultimately decides to commit suicide as she wades into the water. Her awakening had made her painfully cognizant of her tormented life, and she concludes that the only path to mental victory is through death. She rejects the roles patriarchal society expects of her, and, in accomplishing freedom the only way she can, makes “The Awakening” a seminal work of feminist fiction. Female authors like Eliot and Chopin portrayed the “inaudible weeping” of women trapped in systems that deny them their full humanity.

The Feminist Approach Adjoining Edna Pontellier’s Freedom in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

This paper is a feminist interpretation of Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening, in which the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, a woman, portrays the struggle of women in society to construct their own identity, to have their freedom, and understand their life choices. The purpose of this paper is to present Edna’s approach to freedom through the lens of feminism. A feminist approach was used for the text’s critical evaluation. For this study, various works of literature related to novel and feminist approaches were gathered from Jstor and Research Gate and cited in this paper using MLA literature rules.

Edna Pontellier's endeavors as the main character in Kate Chopin’s "The Awakening" in the nineteenth-century liberal feminism

This study analyzed the struggle of Edna Pontellier in the 19th-century liberal feminism in the novel entitled The Awakening written by Kate Chopin. Liberal feminism assumes that the main problem of gender inequality is the domination of institutions by men. Men control the economic sphere, political sphere, along with other things. 19th-century liberal feminism put its focus on women's equal liberty. In general, the novel is about Edna Pontellier, the woman who was trapped in the figure of a mother and wife. She struggled as a woman in the 19th-century to get equal liberty and follow her desires. The researcher used the qualitative method in analyzing the struggle of Edna Pontellier. The results of this study show Edna’s struggles to pursue her desires through Mill and Taylor’s 19th-century liberal feminism theory. She wanted to get the same political rights, economic opportunities, and education that men get. The results also showed the two things that lead Edna to become a figure of liberal feminism: an unhappy married life and her desire to free herself.

케이트 쇼팽의 『각성』: ‘진정한 자아’ 추구

In this paper I offer a feminist analysis of Mrs. Edna Pontellier’s discovery of her “real self” in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. In a tri-fold process, Edna 1) awakens to her duality, 2) pursues her “real self,” and 3) confronts her frustration with contemporary society. Edna’s initial awakening to her duality while at the summer resort Grand Isle emerges as she distinguishes her “real self” from the patriarchal image of the ideal woman in nineteenth-century American society. As she pursues her identity as an independent individual and rejects her false self, she takes bold steps, beginning with halting the onerous social obligation of hosting a weekly reception day every Tuesday−which she had done for every Tuesday for six years−and then denying the marriage system, then hypocritical religion, and then her patriarchal father. She moves out to her pigeon-house in order to gain financial independence from her husband, but after finding no true escape from her predicament, she drowns herself in the sea. Critics are divided between viewing this ending as Edna’s victory or as proof of her defeat. What I argue is that in this seemingly deviant and immoral act, Edna is expressing her angry rebellion against the social oppression of women, in the American Southern society in the late nineteenth century.

Pinion Imagery in Chopin’s The Awakening

This research explores the pinion imagery in Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening. It tries to look at how the imagery of bird’s wings are used to describe the protagonist Edna Pontellier’s effort to break free from the existing mental and physical state in the anticipation of individual freedom. Being a mother of two children and wife of Léonce Pontellier, Edna has confined within the four walls of her house. However, she has been longing for true contentment and happiness in life. The aim of the research is to examine Edna’s struggle to achieve sexual and personal emancipation through the use of semiotics imagery of pinions. Edna’s attempt to escape her husband, children, and society manifest her strong feelings of eros and spreading wings for self-liberation and awakening however, her wings are broken and landed with injured heart leading her to thanatos.

The Heroine's Rebellion and Frustration under Patriarchy

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening(1899) has been a solitary book. Generally recognized today as the first aestheticslly successful novel to have been written by an American women, it marked a significant epoch. The Awakening broke new thematic and stylistic ground as Chopin went boldly beyond the work of her precursors in writing about women s longing for sexual and personal emancipation. Events unfold against a back-drop of elegant homes and secluded resorts. The peculiarities of Creole life and temperament, and the sensuous atmosphere of life in New Orleans and at summer resorts on the Gulf, are happily sketched and outlined in this dramatic tale. Most of Edna’s awakening take place in the unconfined outdoors, in the sensual tropical paradise of Grand Isle. Chopin tells a story of Edna Pontellier who awakens to the injustice of her society and to her own sexsuality, who rebels against patriarchal restrictions, and attempts to realize her inner being through sensuality, love and art. Also, she shows a galaxy of women who adapt perfectly well to the unjust social order in a variety of different roles. Kate Chopin compares and contrasts Edna’s state with a number of others in the book, developing her theme through the polarities of self-absorption(Mademoiselle Reisz) and willing surrender of self to another(Ad&#232;le Ratignolle).

THE INFLUENCE OF THREE MEN IN EDNA PONTELLIER’S LIFE IN THE AWAKENING BY KATE CHOPIN: A Psychoanalytic Study

This paper focuses on the life of Edna Pontellier, the female main character in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. The purpose is to analyse the influence of the three men in Edna Pontellier’s life. The analysis is done using the concept of id, ego, and superego from Freudian psychoanalysis. The result shows that the first man in Edna Pontellier’s life, Mr. Pontellier/her husband, serves as the superego that always directs Edna’s ego. The second man, Robert Lebrun, is her lover who encourages her to win back her ego which makes her able to begin resisting the superego’s demands. The third man, Alcee Arobin, is the woman-seducer who arouses and fullfils her id in the form of sexual desires which has been repressed so far. However, the psychological conflicts that she has to endure lead to her decision to end her own life in her own way. Key words: id, ego, superego, Freudian psychoanalysis.