The New Woman in Kate Chopin's the Awakening Essay

The New Woman in Kate Chopin's the Awakening - Essay Example This means that for almost half a century before Kate Chopin published The Awakening, society had been engaged in a struggle over equal rights issues and social ideologies. As an outcome of this struggle, female part of the society had, to some extent, already undergone mobilization and emancipation from their socioeconomic captivity. The following research is to review and analyze on the example of Kate Chopin's novel about the "sexual awakening" and an unconventional behavior of a woman how for the first time in the USA, women began to bring the formerly private issues of family and home into the public domain and this way caused significant social changes. As many biographers admit today, writing a story of another person's life story is writing one's own as well. If we try to find out why Kate Chopin wrote her novel and how the society accepted it, we will often find the answers in the French women the voices of whom dominated Chopin's formative years. Many historians note that women during the post-Civil War period regularly took part in the marketplace, earned their own sources of support, broke with derogatory forms of financial dependency on men. Culley M. asserts that women "at all levels of society were active in attempts to better their lot, and the "New Woman", the late nineteenth-century equivalent of the "liberated woman", was much on the public mind" (Culley 117). In middle 1899, nearly 50 years after the women's movement officially had started, the social and cultural background seemed favorable for the literary introduction of Edna Pontellier, Kate Chopin's fictional character. The plot of the novel can be depicted in short as follows. The main character, Edna Pontellier is 28 years old, married to a 40-year-old New Orleans businessman who earn living for her and their two sons. She is satisfied but not really happy. During one summer at Grand Isle, a charming Creole resort, she has several awakenings. A real romance occurs between Edna and the resort owner's young son, Robert Lebrun, after he teaches her swimming and she gets the feeling of power and sensuality. Meanwhile, Edna makes friends with Madame Adle Ratignolle, a woman who is fully contented in her traditional woman role, but whose affectionate ways and insights draw Edna to speculate about herself and learn striking things. Being a motherless child and an intellectual Edna now realizes that she has married Lonce Pontellier only in order to annoy her family, and to close the door on unreal obsessions and dreams. She realized that she became a mother without particularly wish to be one, and did not raise that question until that moment. During Edna's summer of awakenings she starts, with the help of her female friends, recovering her voice. The peculiar, slightly sinister pianist Mademoiselle Reisz develops Edna's deep appreciation for music and inspires her flirtation with Robert, who, suddenly leaves for Mexico. After coming back home Edna begins to ignore her wifely obligations. Listening to her own inner voice, Edna starts expressing opinions, and while she is ecstatically alone, organizes a luxurious dinner party before moving herself to a little house. Later on Edna has