14 April 2011
I just finished the Awakening for my ENL seminar class. This is the second time I have read the novel, with the first time being the summer of my junior year for AP Lit. The same impressions from the first reading remain with me, although I did find myself more intrigued the second time around.
Okay, so the story is about this discontented woman from Kentucky who lives among the Creoles in New Orleans. She's not very fond of her husband, she's not really a mother-woman, and she comes to the realization that she has desires, etc. She falls for this gentleman while on vacation with her family. Because he's such a gentleman, he runs off to Mexico to resist his desire. She's devastated (uhm, she's married??). She attempts to attain a sense of freedom from her social expectations and her mother-woman/wife duties to work on her art. She asserts her freedom when her husband goes to New York for business. And after a while, she eventually has a relationship with a really shady guy (everyyone knows it!), all-the-while thinking about the one who ran to Mexico. She's the unconventional woman of the time.
I dislike her. She's annoyingly selfish. A few of the characters call her actions childish because she never gives time to reflect on her choices. She's impulsive. I'm all for empowering women's choice and being selfish for one's own desires, I really do. I hate being confined.
What Edna represents repulses me because she gives so little thought to her actions. She's walking around like a drama queen. Oh, and the fact that she comes to the realization that there is more to the world around her, at age 26, baffles the hell outta me.
I sympathize with her cause and her confusion through all her troubles. I get that she's unhappy. I understand that she wants to be her own woman. I know she just wants true love. But the fact that she drowns herself at the end of the novel after her long-awaited awakening makes me think that her whole journey was insignificant and pointless.
If she can't live with the choices she's made, then she's weak. Mademoiselle Reisz was right. Only birds with strong wings have the courage to make self-sacrificing choices. Edna Pontellier deludes herself with the idea and causes her own demise. She just dies -__-
Dumbest female character to grace the pages of literature. Although, I retract my statement for a moment to say this: Edna Pontellier is the dumbest female character to grace the pages of early 19th century literature. For modern novels, the protagonist from Memoirs of a Geisha is pretty damn stupid.
She would have been heroic if she didn't off herself -____-