"Go away! Go away! For Heaven's sake! That's all right!" These words, rambled out by a brash little parrot, mark the opening, of Kate Chopin's Victorian novel The Awakening. These lines immediately place in the reader's mind a notion that they will have some significance to the story later on, as odd as they may sound. (At least, they did to me). The Awakening is a story of a character who runs into many wallsof hardship on her journey of self-exploration. Edna Pontellier is a Southern wife and mother of two young boys. She is a young women of 28 who is bored with her ordinary life as an ordinary wife in her ordinary house with her ordinary husband.I have found that in most analysis produced by professionals and novices alike, Edna is perceived as a courageous woman struggling against society's consideration of a proper Southern wife, trying to fight the mold that it has forced on her as an obedient complement to her husband. Despite the overwhelming amount of opinions like this, and since few (if any) know Kate Chopin's actual intent, I find myself disagreeing with the majority, for various reasons that I shall point to throughout my analysis. I shall first, however, give the main reason for the way my interpretation is; in the Victorian era, although women were not respected and thought of as inferiors to men in almost every aspect, wives and mothers were held in the highest regards. Not only respected, but they were also considered socially superior to men and were like 'tamers' of the feral instincts of their savage husbands and sons. Once, a (male) writer from that era said the following: "A women is nothing. A wife is everything. A pretty girl is worth a thousand men. A mother, is next to a god." These are very powerful ideas of the feminine roles in society, granted they were the only roles considered suitable for women, as it required nothing but their natural feminine instincts, they were important. Thus, wives were respected...