Two Sentence Modifiers In The Awakening

In the book, The Awakening, Kate Chopin addresses a common struggles woman face in society through the main character Edna Pontellier during the 1800s. Edna Pontellier is an American woman infused with charm and grace. Edna’s charm could not escape her. She moved gracefully among the crowds and appeared self-contained. Edna learned to master her feeling by not to showing outward and spoken feelings of affections, either in herself or in others. This common custom seems to be understood among wealthy married women and their husbands. However, one summer while vacationing at the Grand Isle, the reserved manner Edna always enveloped began to loosen a little and her soul began to awaken.
That summer, a young man named Robert Lebrun stirred Edna’s …show more content…
These two sentence modifiers paint a picture of the setting. The main clause of the sentence follows the two sentence modifiers. The main clause is Edna wrote a charming letter to her husband. Edna functions as the subject of the sentence while wrote a charming letter to her husband functions as the verb predicate. The word wrote indicates the tense of the clause which happened in the past. In the Kellogg- Reed diagram, the verb wrote is placed in the verb slot and Before dinner in the evening attaches to the verb separately and diagrammed as adverbial prepositional phrases describing when Edna wrote the letter. In comparison to the tree diagram, the Kellogg-Reed diagram does not suggest these structures are sentence modifiers, whereas the tree diagram labels their form and …show more content…
A comma in the tree diagrams onsets the participle phrase which indicates a slight pause in thought and another series of thoughts that are about to occur. The second particle phrase regretting that he was not there is another charming phrase Chopin uses to explain Edna’s attitude and her concluding thoughts to her husband. On the Kellogg-Reed diagram, this participle phrase connects to Edna, the subject just like the first participle phrase. Again, the connection displays a new continuing action describing her thoughts. Edna’s thoughts shift in tone from telling her husband to regretting he was not there. She really is not regretting that he was not there to share it, but this is the polite thing to say to her husband. The word regretting is another one of Chopin’s charming ways to describe Edna deceptive thoughts. Edna makes up in her mind that no one would ever oppress her feelings of love and affection anymore. She did not regret her husband’s presence. She despised him. The word regretting is an outright defiance towards Mr. Pontellier in the relations to the larger text of the novel, but reading outside of the context of the book Edna seems sad. Edna’s deceptive charm continues in the series of infinitive phrases to help her with the menu and assist her in entertaining the