The Search for Language in The Awakening Essay -- Chopin Awakening Es

The Search for Language in The Awakening Kate Chopins novel, The Awakening, tells the story of a late nineteenth century woman toilsome to break away from the male-dominated community to vex an identity of her own. Edna Pontellier is trying to find herself when only two personas are available to her the true woman, the classic married woman and mother, or the new woman, the radical women demanding equality with men. Patricia S. Yaeger, in her essay A Language Which goose egg Understood Emancipatory Strategies in The Awakening, argues that what Edna is really searching for is a distaff language of her own. Edna is prevented from finding her own language and ideal and thence is trapped until she discovers that suicide is her only way out. The ending of the novel has been considered Ednas final step in her search for freedom from the restrictive society she lives in. Elaine Showalter, in her essay Tradition and the Female Talent The Awakening as a Solitary Book, and others say t hat it is Ednas last move towards womanly liberation, but is it really? Suicide hardly seems liberating. Edna lives in a phallocentric valet de chambre where women have no identities apart from their relationships with men. Leslies W. Rabine, in her essay No mixed-up Paradise Social grammatical gender and Symbolic Gender in the books of Maxine Hong Kingston, says that traditional male narratives are based on a linear and circular quest to return to a lost paradise (Rabine 90), however, female narratives do not have this lost paradise. The world in which Edna lives traps her so that the paradise she is seeking cannot exist. The paradise Edna is looking for is nothing more than a situation in which she can be truly happy. The fundamentally phallocentric... ...Awakening. 1993 Bedford Books, in the raw York. Griggers, Cody. Next Stop Paradise An Analysis of Setting in The Awakening. interior(prenominal) Goddess. Editor, Kim Wells. August 23, 1999. Online. Internet. 5-10-00. htt p//www.womenwriters.net/domesticgoddess/griggers.htm Rabine, Leslie W. No Lost Paradise Social and Symbolic Gender in the Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston. As it appears in Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia. Maxine Hong Kingstons The muliebrity Warrior A Casebook. 1999 Oxford University Press, New York. Showalter, Elaine. Tradition and the Female Talent The Awaking as a Solitary Book. As it appears in Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. 1993 Bedford Books, New York. Yaeger, Patricia S. A Language Which Nobody Understood Emancipatory Language in The Awakening. As it appears in Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. 1993 Bedford Books, New York.