Journal: The Awakening

The Awakening by Kate Chopin is a painfully home hitting novella that expresses the truths about love, sanity, captivity, and freedom. Chopin seemingly pulls every emotion hidden within the heart, soul, and body out and into conscious comprehension. The empathy felt for Edna Pontellier is gut wrenchingly intense and personal. Through this story, Chopin expresses her feministic rebellious views and her dark gnosis about salvation from captivity.

            Through Edna and the rest of the characters in The Awakening, Chopin tells us that love is nothing more than a misconstrued infatuation. Edna does not love her husband, she claims to love Robert. She lived her life in blindness until she began her transformation of knowledge with her deep connection to and desire for Robert. Her philosophical eyes slowly opening, she senses her despair when she is either not with Robert or not alone. She remembers her lovers when she was young, when she felt less restricted. She becomes seemingly bipolar with her tremendous mood swings, so much that Léonce believes her to be going mad, not understanding the truth of sanity.

            Sanity is a conformist term. Sanity is what the majority of the world calls itself. Sanity is how the majority of the world thinks. The minority is called insane, crazy, or on occasion genius, but never the latter before one of the prior. Every visionary, every genius has been dubbed out of their mind by the world at one point in time. For instance, General Billy Mitchell envisioned an independent Air Force from the Army for the United States. Fellow generals ridiculed him and had him expunged from the military. His ideas were recognized as genius after his death, and he was given a posthumous promotion. When the world conforms to believe its way is the only sane, sensible, and correct way, then sanity becomes the general consensus. Edna is thought to be insane by her husband. He is simply conforming the term sanity. Edna does not assimilate with her environment any longer. She does not conform to the corrupt anti-feministic views of her world. She recognizes the corruption and evils around her and she recognizes that she has no way to abolish them. Due to this she is now plagued by her new found truths and is greatly misunderstood by Léonce.

             Edna’s position has her captive. She is a slave to her society, her family, her lover, and to herself. She cannot break the bounds of the biased environment that holds all women captive and inferior to their male counterparts. Her society has condemned her to a life that is not her own. She is owned by her husband and children. She must morph to the whims of Léonce. She has to give everything to her family. She rebels against them, saying she will not give them herself. She dedicates her soul to Robert, whom she loves. His actions directly affect her psyche and her emotions. She it held captive by Robert’s decisions. More importantly, she is captive to herself. She cannot escape her own desires, her own choices, beliefs and knowledge. She is plagued by her own existence, and the accumulation of all these captivities drives her to see the only true escape, the sole true freedom.

            Let’s be honest; are we free? Are any of us free? Of course not! There is no way to be free on Earth, no possibility to be free of pain, free of captivity, slavery, emotion, debt, responsibility, consequence, or of self. Edna recognized this, and upon losing the one thing that held her to this enslaving world, she acquired the dark unaddressed gnosis of freedom. The only way to be free is to die. Death is the only door out of slavery and captivity, and therefore she took that door gladly. Many critics question if Chopin means to illustrate Edna’s cowardice after her emotional destruction, however I believe that it is a final testimony to escape, to salvation, to freedom.