Dealing with Society Edna Pontelliers Battle with Social Class Essay

Dealing with fellowship Edna Pontelliers Battle with Social Class Edna Pontellier, the main character in Kate Chopins novel The Awakening, is a woman trying to form her own identity, twain feminine and sexually, in the repressive and Victorian Creole world of the latter(prenominal) nineteenth century. She is met by a counterpart, Mademoiselle Reisz, who is able to live freely as a woman. Edna herself was denied this freedom because of the healthy societal position she had been wed into and because of her Presbyterian up bringing as a child. The role that Mademoiselle Reisz vie within society, a society that failed to view her as being a truly respectable social member, was quite opposite to that of Ednas respectable position in society. Edna was ordained in the Presbyterian ways as she became an braggart(a) in Kentucky and Mississippi (Companion 123) as one critic put it, she was of inviolable old Presbyterian Kentucky stock (Petry 58). Edna was raised in a truly cut ba ck Victorian (Nikerson) manner to be an American womanwith a supple severity of poise and move handst (Companion 123). To understand the social order she was born(p) into you have to look at the Presbyterian background she grew up in. Presbyterianism took the view that women were regarded as equal to menbut women were the weaker vesseland should become subordinate to the husband (Wolff 2). In broader terms, this is saying that women are equal, but are still below men in society. This construct was reinforced by the fact that married women in Louisiana, in Ednas time, were legal property of their husbands (Chopin 121). By a broad range, women of high Victorian society were greatly scrutinized if they tried to shade out of any of the normal set boun... ...ction. Westport, Greenwood Press Inc., 1988Chopin, Kate and Cully Margo, Ed. The Awakening A Norton diminutive Edition. New York Norton & Comp., 1994.Mahon, Robert Lee. Beyond the love triangle trios in The Awakening. Th e midwestern United States Quarterly 39.2 (1998) 228-236.McCoy, Thorunn Ruga. Chopins The Awakening. The Explicator 56.1 (1997) 27-26 InfroTrac SearchBank. Online. 30 Nov. 1998.Nickerson, Megan. Romanticism in The Awakening. Online. 29 Nov. 1998Petry, Alice. Critical Essays on Kate Chopin. Printice Hall International., 1996Thorton, Lawrence. The Awakening A Political Romance. American books 52 (1980) 50-66.Wolff, Cynthia Griffin. Un-utterable longing the discourse of feminine sexuality in The Awakening. Studies in American Fiction 24.1 (1996) 3-23. InfroTrac SearchBank. Online. 30 Nov. 1998.