In the early nineteenth century, women throughout the nation were reluctant to speak out. Inferior to the male population, their actions, voices, and thoughts were submissive and invisible. Seen as objects, few women contested to the plight that cemented them until the late nineteenth century. In 1899, Kate Chopin published The Awakening, which initiated women's first steps from the trench of the oppression society had burrowed. In this novel, Edna Pontellier becomes "awakened" through Chopin's many rhetorical devices. The symbolism of music and art allow Edna to express her strive for independence from society's restraints and to illustrate combat for her sexual identity.
             Critics of Kate Chopin's The Awakening tend to read the novel as the dramatization of a woman's struggle to achieve selfhood, a struggle doomed to failure either because the patriarchal conventions of her society restrict her freedom, or because ideal of selfhood that she pursues is a masculinity defined one that allows for none of the physical and undeniable claims which maternity makes upon women. Ultimately, in both views, Edna ends her life because she cannot have it both ways: given her time, place, and notion of self, she cannot be a mother and have a self at the same time.
             At the beginning of The Awakening, Edna Pontellier alienates herself from society only on an emotional level. She felt as if "a certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her, the light which, showing the way, forbids it". As the novel progresses, she voices her feelings and begins to put them into action. However, Edna must face the fact that her ideas are not socially acceptable. When Edna's beliefs contradict those in her community, the community's moral values are revealed by the society's reactions to Edna's role as a mother, her treatment of her husband, and her desire for other men.
             Mademoiselle Reisz was known as one of "the ...