![]() ![]() But such a reading would be somewhat anachronistic.” Because, Baym adds, of the “relatively crude forms of birth control and the enormous risks of childbearing in those days-every act of sexual intercourse was, for a woman, a literally life-endangering act.” Progressive women in Kate Chopin’s day, she concludes, “were more likely to perceive sexual freedom as being freedom from sex rather than freedom through sex. “A contemporary reader,” Nina Baym writes, “may well be inclined to understand Edna’s sexual emancipation as a feminist issue. ![]() were reborn as a fin de siècle New Orleans housewife, says Chopin, Edna Pontellier’s fate would be her fate.” But what can be-must be-her fate?” Kate Chopin, Gilbert argues, examines “the difficulty of the struggles for autonomy that she imagines would have engaged any nineteenth-century woman who experienced such a fantastic transformation. In one of the best-known essays about the novel, Sandra Gilbert argues that “metaphorically speaking, Edna has become Aphrodite, or at least a devotee of that goddess. Instead, by withholding the moral of this moralistic tale and leaving the nature and value of Edna’s awakening essentially unresolved, Chopin delineates the difficulty of calibrating the appropriate relationship between the self and society.” Ewell writes, “permits no easy answers to the moral questions raised by conflict between the individual and social restraints. “Chopin’s sense of a complex reality,” Barbara C. Per Seyersted writing in 1969, near the beginning of the literary revival that propelled The Awakening into its present place of importance in American literature, noted that part of what makes the novel feel so modern is Edna Pontellier’s realization that “the physical component of love can stand apart from the spiritual one, that sensuous attraction is impersonal and can be satisfied by a partner she does not love.” He plays a central role in the Chopin stories “A Respectable Woman” and “Athénaîse”Īn enormous amount has been written about the novel for many years. In French his name means a rudder, a tiller, with the implication that he is someone who knows the direction, who understands where things are headed.
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