The novel The Awakening is written by Kate Chopin. The plot consists of the conflict
between Edna, the protagonist, and the expectation required of her as a Creole wife. Her
escape from her husband, Leonce, and children comes to her at the Grand Isle, the family's
vacationing home, in the form of Robert Lebrun. Because she feels trapped in her role as a
woman living during the early 1900's, she seeks Robert's youthful companionship!
Leonce being nearly twice her age is a bore, and Chopin uses this boring marriage and
Edna's affairs to express the resentment and frustration of a woman during the 1900's. In
the novel, The Awakening, the main character Edna, expresses disqust and resentment of
her life through her lack of enjoying her children, her desire for Robert, her relation ship
with Leonce, her husband, and her own sense of being trapped emotionally.
Edna Pontellier is a mother of two young boys who are four and five. These are the two
boys who she is expected to devote her whole life to. "If one of the little Pontellier boys
took a tumble whilst at play, he was not apt to rush crying to his mothers arms for
comfort"(Chopin 9). "In short, Mrs. Pontelleir was not a mothers-woman"(Chopin 9).
George Arms in his criticism states, "With them she has little intamacy, and her husband
accuses her of neglecting them"(178). On some occassions she does show some affection
to her children. In his review of the book Arms recalls that, "When she suspects that
Robert goes to Mexico to avoid her, she shows an unusual intimacy with her children by
telling them a bedtime story"(179). Although she probably does this to fulfill her own
lonely needs, rather than nurture her children, The normal bond between mother and child
was not evident in this novel, and this certainly could have added to her resentment.
Another critic Elizabeth Fox-Genovese ...