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

Margit Stanges Literary Criticism of Chopins The AwakeningKate Chopin created Edna Pontellier, but neither the source nor her creator was divorced from the world in which Chopin lived. As a marrow to understand the choices Chopin gave Edna, Margit Stange evaluates The Awakening in the linguistic context of the feminist ideology of the slowly nineteenth century. Specifically, she argues that Edna is seeking what Chopins contemporaries denoted self-ownership, a notion that pivoted on familiar choice and voluntary motherhood (276). Stange makes a series of meaningful connections between Kate Chopins dramatization of Edna Pontelliers awakening and the historical context of feminist thought that Stange believes influenced the novel. For example, she equates Ednas quest for financial independence with the new-made nineteenth centurys Married Womens Property Acts, which sought-after(a) to give married women greater control over their property and earnings. Ultimately, Stange believes, Ednas awakening, her acquisition of self-determination, comes from identifying and re-distributing what she owns, which Stange argues is her body, much as contemporary feminist thinkers discussed what she calls womens sexual exchange value (281). Additional references to reformers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as strong as the legal standards of femme seule and femme couverte buttress Stanges position that Ednas experiences are a reflection of historical reality, even if some of the equations are a bit rough. Chopin, Stange notes, is careful to separate Edna the wife from Edna the woman Mrs. Pontellier becomes Edna in the text, and so Mrs. Pontellier once more when her sense of self-ownership again seems lost. Chopin... ...alls a moment of extreme point maternal giving, Stanton argued for womens right to a public voice because all woman goes to the gates of stopping point to give life to every man that is innate(p) into the world no wiz can sha re 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). Chopin may have had a clearer dig up of the immense hold of the rhetoric of motherhood than Stange acknowledges. Edna at the gates of death may be a woman caught in an evolving conception of self-ownership, care-laden by the sorrow of realizing that she can only really own what she no longer wants, because what she does want is yet beyond her grasp. Ednas trap is and so a historical reflection, a comment on the tumultuous, even violent, evolution of ideologies, expectations, choices, and realities.