Woman, Awakening

I was browsing through some of the papers I wrote in college and, having chanced upon a review I wrote on Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening, I shook my head at the anger I sensed creeping on its (my review's) pages. It was funny--and sad, at the same time--to note how, even at that point in my life, my indignance at the failure of society (even now, at this modern age) to recognize woman's rightful place, was already incipient.
Here are some "tell-tale" signs:

1. Kate Chopin’s decision to make her heroine swim away to sea, at the end of her controversial novel The Awakening, has been met by raised eyebrows and emphatic shakes of the head. That it is symbolic of twenty-eight-year-old Edna Pontellier’s final, total emancipation from all that used to chain her, was never justification enough for such an act. This, and most—if not all—parts of the whole novel have elicited condemnation, even as it is a novel that seeks to tell woman’s story in an honest, uninhibited light.

2. For many, during the time of the novel’s publication—and even now, at this present time—the conclusion, and the actions that preceded it, were indecent, immoral and improper. This was, of course, to be expected, coming as it did from a world that, even as I write, has only just begun to recognize woman’s place as that of man’s equal. Even this last concept is problematic, for why must we always look at woman in relation to man?

3. Mademoiselle Reisz, as I see her, is Edna Pontellier’s doppelganger. She seems, at first, to be Edna’s complete opposite so that we might dismiss the connection that binds them as brought about by their differences. Upon closer inspection, however, it is easy to see that they are very much alike, only that one of them has not yet learned to see herself for what she is, has not yet awakened to her true nature. It seems that Mademoiselle Reisz—a musician, unmarried, completely devoid of any care what other people might say—is the person that Edna wants to be. The latter, though, lacks the recklessness, the utter disregard for societal opinion that the former has.

4. Taking all these other characters into consideration, perhaps Edna’s suicide would not be so difficult to understand. Every woman is the product and, in this case, the victim of all that surrounds her. Foremost among these are the confining walls that society has erected, and is still erecting around her. Edna Pontellier is simply the prototype of the repressed woman who, awakening at a certain point in her life to the fact that she is no longer content to be the way she is, or that the world that society has built for her has become too narrow for her to be able to breathe, decides to swim away to freedom, even if it be death which that freedom stands for.

Hurrah to girl-power!
(cough, cough)
Better get me a glass of water.