Naturalism In Madsen's The Awakening

Madsen offers a psychoanalytic reading of The Awakening. She argues that Edna is caught between the Imaginary (pre-Oedipus complex) and Symbolic (post-Oedipus complex) worlds, and is trying to return to the Imaginary. Madsen argues that Edna’s early loss of her mother disrupts the normal Electra complex and instead leaves Edna in psychosexual allegiance with her father, but with “no model of feminine gender construction” (112). Edna’s mother’s death removes young Edna’s possibility of returning to “pre-Oedipal identification with her mother” (113). Because of this disruption, Edna never fully developed. As she begins her awakening, Edna begins to shift her allegiance back from masculine to feminine, and therefore begins a regression from the …show more content…
He refutes Nancy Walker’s idea that naturalism and feminism are mutually exclusive. Magraf argues that evidence of naturalism in The Awakening can be found through its rejection of traditional western civilization, emphasis on heredity and the impact of environment, scientific treatment of sex, and prominence of the scientist figure in Dr. Mandelet. Margraf then connects the naturalist conceptualization of the text with a feminist one: he argues that Edna has become aware that as a person with a female body, her experience of sex is intrinsically linked with childbirth. She “finally realizes what it means for a woman to aspire after personal fulfillment without renouncing sensual pleasure” (107). Margraf argues that Edna, after witnessing Adele’s painful delivery, realizes that she can never “consummate… her love” (108) with a man without getting pregnant and being forced to give birth. Edna’s suicide, therefore, is in revolt against nature: she ‘eludes’ her born and unborn children by allowing herself to be “dissolved by nature… [rather than] defined by it” (108). Edna rejects nature’s impact on her biology by destroying herself through