Dealing with Society Edna Pontelliers Battle with Social Class Essay

Dealing with Society Edna Pontelliers passage of arms with Social Class Edna Pontellier, the main character in Kate Chopins unfermented The Awakening, is a woman trying to form her own identity, both distaff and sexually, in the repressive and mincing Creole world of the latter 19th century. She is met by a counterpart, Mademoiselle Reisz, who is able to live freely as a woman. Edna herself was denied this freedom because of the respectable societal business office she had been married into and because of her Presbyterian up bringing as a child. The role that Mademoiselle Reisz played indoors society, a society that failed to view her as being a really respectable social member, was quite opposite to that of Ednas respectable position in society. Edna was ordained in the Presbyterian ways as she became an adult in Kentucky and Mississippi (Companion 123) as one critic put it, she was of solid gray Presbyterian Kentucky stock (Petry 58). Edna was raised in a truly restri cted Victorian (Nikerson) manner to be an American womanwith a graceful harshness of poise and movement (Companion 123). To understand the social order she was born into you shake off to look at the Presbyterian background she grew up in. Presbyterianism took the view that women were regarded as constitute to menbut women were the weaker vesseland should become subordinate to the husband (Wolff 2). In immenseer terms, this is manifestation that women are equal, but are still below men in society. This construct was reinforced by the fact that married women in lanthanum, in Ednas time, were legal property of their husbands (Chopin 121). By a broad range, women of high Victorian society were greatly scrutinized if they tried to step bug out of any of the normal set boun... ...ction. Westport, Greenwood Press Inc., 1988Chopin, Kate and Cully Margo, Ed. The Awakening A Norton vituperative Edition. New York Norton & Comp., 1994.Mahon, Robert Lee. Beyond the love triangle trios in The Awakening. The Midwest quarterly 39.2 (1998) 228-236.McCoy, Thorunn Ruga. Chopins The Awakening. The Explicator 56.1 (1997) 27-26 InfroTrac SearchBank. Online. 30 Nov. 1998.Nickerson, Megan. Romanticism in The Awakening. Online. 29 Nov. 1998Petry, Alice. Critical Essays on Kate Chopin. Printice Hall International., 1996Thorton, Lawrence. The Awakening A Political Romance. American Literature 52 (1980) 50-66.Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Un-utterable longing the discourse of feminine sexuality in The Awakening. Studies in American Fiction 24.1 (1996) 3-23. InfroTrac SearchBank. Online. 30 Nov. 1998.