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 amongst 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 be Stanges well-chosen references to the contemporary 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 maternal quality. Ednas awakening, her acquisition of self-determination, comes from identifying and re-distri thoing what she owns, which Stange argues is her body. For example, Ednas shinny indicates early in the novel her more complex relationship with her husband. Her colour hands seem to indicate a woman who has performed a advertise 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 be reminded of Leonces status by the tan his wife has acquired while see an elite resort (279-80). The clash between the appearance of labor and unoccupied 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 specie with which her husband buys respectability and esteem. By withholding sexual and social favors, Edna ruptures Leonces privileged comfort and establishes herself as femme seule, literally providing for herself with an independent income (282, 286). Stange links this situat... ...ity. surely that is an effective material argument, and further exploration of contemporary criticisms of birth control, from two men and women, could provide even greater context for understanding how women regarded maternal quality and to what extent they saw it as voluntary. But Stange herself points to a profound teaching of Stantons that more clearly 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 merely woman goes to the gates of death to give life to every man that is born(p) into the world no hotshot can 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).