The Inner Struggle In Kate Chopin's The Awakening

To understand someone, look at the way they deal with obstacles in their life. The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, is a kunsterroman novel about a woman named Edna Pointellier that lives in New Orleans in that late 1800s who has an internal struggle because she does not agree with society. Something that could be learned from this novel is to not conform to society if it makes oneself unhappy. Edna’s internal struggle is exploited through her relationship with her family, friends, and her choice of committing suicide. Some people argue that family should be the most important thing in life, but in Edna’s they only push her to become more unhappy. Edna is a married woman who does not love her husband and occasionally forgets about her two children. The only reason why Edna married was because it was a custom of that time. One night when the Pointellier family was …show more content…
Edna was fed up with her children and husband thinking that “they could possess her, body and soul” (Chopin, 156). This is the point where Edna decides to kill herself because she could feel the “realities pressing into her soul” (42). The society that she lived in pushed her to do this. Her thought at the removal from her society made her feel “like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known” (156). Throughout the kunsterroman novel, The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, the protagonist, Edna has to make a lethal decision to overcome her inner conflict. Edna does not fit in with her society. She describes her marriage as an “accident” (Chopin, 24). She does not show love towards her husband and children. Her friends confuse her about society, one pulls her in and one pulls her out, and she gets so disturbed that she decided to take herself out of it in a whole by killing herself. This proved that one should not conform to society if it makes oneself