Margit Stange’s Literary Criticism of Chopin’s The Awakening Essay

Margit Stanges Literary Criticism of Chopins The AwakeningMargit Stange makes a series of meaningful connections between Kate Chopins dramatization of Edna Pontelliers awakening and the historical context of feminist thought which Stange believes influenced the novel. Part of understanding Ednas motives and Chopins thinking are Stanges well-chosen references to the modern-day ideology that shapes Ednas thinking and her choices. Stange argues that Edna is seeking the late-nineteenth-century conception of self-ownership, which pivots on voluntary motherhood. Ednas awakening, her acquisition of self-determination, comes from identifying and re-distri justing what she owns, which Stange argues is her body. For example, Ednas skin indicates early in the novel her much complex relationship with her husband. Her sunburned hands seem to indicate a woman who has performed a labor of some necessity, therefore making her unrecognizable as the wife of a respected and prosperous businessman. At the same time, those who see her and know who she is are reminded of Leonces status by the tan his wife has acquired patch visiting an elite resort (279-80). The clash between the appearance of labor and leisure in Ednas form gradually comes to favor the look of leisure, but it is Edna who increasingly defines how she spends her time, and what constitutes leisure.By casting off the duties that come with being Mrs. Pontellier, Edna is devaluing the currency with which her husband buys respectability and esteem. By withholding sexual and social favors, Edna ruptures Leonces favor comfort and establishes herself as femme seule, literally providing for herself with an independent income (282, 286). Stange links this situat... ...ity. Certainly that is an effective material argument, and further exploration of contemporary criticisms of birth control, from both men and women, could submit even greater context for understanding how women regarded motherhood and to what extent they saw it as voluntary. But Stange herself points to a profound statement of Stantons that more understandably defines the power mothers wielded socially, and the great loss of self-ownership motherhood entailed, both of which Edna Pontellier came to understand and control. Describing what Stange calls a moment of extreme maternal giving, Stanton wrote alone woman goes to the gates of death to give spirit to every man that is born into the world no one crapper share her fears, no one can mitigate her pangs and if her sorrow is greater than she can bear, alone she passes beyond the gates into the vast unknown (289).