* Another paper for class. As you might guess, I wasn’t a fan of the book.
For a book that supposed to be an example of early feminism, The Awakening doesn’t exactly paint a pretty picture for how it turns out for women. In its story of freedom, love, lust (mostly lust), and abandonment, there’s plenty to not look kindly on.
Edna Pontellier, a privileged woman in Louisiana who married into the Creole culture finds that she’s not really satisfied with her life of ease and inattentive husband. Said husband, Leonce, spends most of his time either working or playing billiards with the other affluent men. Even her children don’t seem to keep her happy, and with the nanny to take care of them, they don’t really require much of her attention anyway.
Most of her time in the beginning of the book is spent on the beach at a resort with her friend Adele and Robert, a member of the family that owns the resort. Occasionally she dabbles in drawing, mostly for the amusement of her friends. Robert finds a wealthy Creole woman to attend to and flirt with every year, usually with no real meaning behind the flirting. Edna, however, is reeled in by his flirting and starts to pine for him despite playing the part of being happily married and devoted to her family. The two want to be together and Edna wants more and more freedom from her family life, encouraged in part by Mademoiselle Reisz, a local musician. Robert, however, is still reluctant because of her married status.
Eventually, she does get the freedom she craves. While her husband is away from home working, she packs herself (and only herself, leaving her children behind) and finds her own place and begins to focus on her art and being the person she really is inside. In the course of finding herself, she ends up hooking up with the town flirt, who has a severely bad reputation and, by association, ruins the reputation of any woman seen with him. I suppose once one becomes known as the town bicycle, one can only go up from there. If only that were true.
With further encouragement from Mademoiselle Reisz, Edna continues with her art, and even begins to make some money from it. Robert finally comes and finds her, and they have their almost-fling, whispering sweet nothings and whatnot. During the course of this, Edna’s friend Adele has another child, and Edna attends her during the birth. Adele pleads with her to come back home and to think of her children. She does think of them, for all of two minutes. The family doctor also pleads with her, saying that if anything is troubling her to talk to him about it, and he’ll be as helpful and understanding as possible. Meanwhile, Robert ends up not being able to go through with the affair again, leaving her a note that since she’s still married, he’s saying goodbye for the good of both of them.
Edna goes into despair at this point, thinking that if it isn’t her husband, the town flirt, or Robert that she yearns for and then it goes badly with, it’ll just be someone else. She also realizes again that she can’t live her life tied down by her children, and in the course of about two pages decides to drown herself in the ocean, and then does that very thing, leaving her husband and children behind again for the sake of “freedom”.
I realize she wasn’t in a happy marriage. Her husband was gone all the time either working or playing with his friends. I realize that early Creole culture was rather hypocritical, saying that the wife had to be devoted to her husband and children alone while the husband was allowed to have an entire separate family with a woman of color. I can see why she’d want out of that, once the naivety of youth wore off, even if divorce is practically unheard of at the time.
What I can’t see, is why she’d completely abandon her children and want nothing to do with them. On top of that, she becomes passionate about her art, but then once the boy she wants to be with leaves her, she still decides that nothing is worth living for, and her supposed final act of freedom is really just the coward’s way out. It turns out that she can’t either be with her family, happy or not, and she also can’t deal with the consequences of having left them and restarted her life on her own. So she ends it.
So the moral of the story is, if you feel tied down by your husband and children, just leave them. Go find some random guy to sleep with. Make sure you use protection though. I’m sure syphilis treatment back then was much less pleasant than it is now. Then, if the guy you really want decides he can’t be with you, forget about everything in life, including the things you are still passionate about (in this case, art) and just commit suicide. Yay for early feminism.
