The Awakening - Kate Chopin

The Awakening, a sensuous novel, I enjoyed it very much.  It is nice to finally read more from female authors.  As a student who has most recently been studying anthropology courses, this novel reads like a narrative on an ethnography of a married's woman's life just before the turn of the 19th century.

Edna is clearly resisting gender and societal mores and norms.  She exposes explicitly women's sexuality, a taboo subject during her time.  She reasserts herself as an individual and as a woman, as opposed to as her husband's property.   She 'breaks loose', moves out, tries to support herself - she realizes in the sad ending that to be independent is to be alone as Mademoiselle Reisz is.  Mutual love that cannot ever be realized between Edna and Robert.

Edna's children do not seem to get much attention from her as she is busy with her personal awakening but in the end, she sacrfices herself so as not to taint their reputations and future.  Is it a sacrifice of love for her children? I am not clear.  The children are talked about at some points as a burden as while she can sever her ties on her husband, she cannot do so with her children.  They weigh her down.  She ends her life to end her loneliness/misery which she knows will accompany her whole life as an independent woman.  Did she 'awaken' and remembered her children in the end?  I am not sure...

I can certainly relate to Edna's awakening.  Many of us have in our own ways, broken out of our old molds by breaking social and gender norms.  Not all women have a maternal instinct.  I have not really desired to procreate, not because I view them as a burden, on the contrary, I adore and love kids and generally feel happy around them but I am too afraid to take the risk to become a mother and I just do not see the need to create a mini-me.  I have fallen into the trap in the past that independence meant empowerful, which it is in many days, but if one is still mentally in chains, one cannot truly be free.  I was once in love and I was very independent but my mental chains were tying me to a man I was hopelessly in love with - the problem is that it was an abusive relationship, mentally and financially.  And so Edna's 'rebirth' or 'awakening' speaks dear to me as I have awakened oh so many times: (1) to recognize myself as an individual but to remember my relationship to others around me,  (2) to become more socially aware and to actually care and to get angry about issues, angry enough to want to do something, (3) to be aware of the horrific suffering of animals that was just 'food' to me in the past, to be completely moved by my willful blindess to this large scale suffering, brought out extreme guilt in me..  which I am still in the process of reconciling.  I have been seeking a Krishna last year to teach me, to tell me what to do...  I realize later rather than never that only I, hold the answers to my own internal dilemmas..  but dialogue certainly helps.  To hear different perspectives.  I try to convey this in my work, when students ask me "What should I study?", "What should I become?" and so forth.

It is sad that Edna ends her life abruptly at the end.  I have experienced depression/despair - I think we all have and can understand the pain that one feels when one is grieving or in despair.  I would certainly never advocate suicide as the solution but I can understand wanting to end the pain or to die rather than to live in chains, be it real or metaphorically speaking.