Free soul ——The Awakening

The Awakening, a simple story written by Kate Chopin, published in 1899 and once were banned in the following few years. Kate Chopin, a famous author who lived in a era when a feminism boosted, using a completely different words to explain how a female regain her soul and reborn.
 
   We cannot view this book based on the frame that based on exited social perceptions, because Love affair is not accepted, and it concerns about the social immortality. But in this book, we should more care about the female herself. The author expatiated the heroine’ s subtle psychological change, which made me identify with her and astonishingly found myself also in the same struggle like her: the freedom and the chain.

It was a story about the woman, Edna, who lived in a peaceful, rich but dull life, fall into the love affair but found her true self and soul in her struggle against the social convention.
I would like to discuss the struggle of woman chasing the freedom and how she awakened herself in her fighting.

The first time I understood why Edna always had a different perceptions was his husband’ s unreasonable reprove, which made us feel the mechanical of wife’ s duty. It was annoying. But she always had to follow the exited convention. Their marriage sounds like a compensation instead of true love. “They seemed never before to have weighed much against the abundance of her husband’s kindness and a uniform devotion which had come to be tacit and self-understood.”
 
 Life seems peaceful but she lives in a dull way. She began to find out the meaning of life. She want to be free and she begins to have a notion that she belongs to herself only. She wants to have a initive. All these feelings are arisen when she gets along with the man called Robert. He taught Edna to swim in the sea. From then on, Edna awakens.

It seams that the love affairs gave her the power to know herself well. But we can find that she has acted differently than others when she was young and from others view, she actually is independent personally.

She doesn’t love her husband, even her children. She thinks all these things are obstruction, which makes her feel unhappy. She always has a strange imagination. Like sea, only sea in her mind ,can she be set free. So the novel describe the sea in detail. The sea is a great metaphor. She awakens in the sea.

After Robert’s gone, Edna was fell into the despair but actually it was the process that kindles her rebellion. She has love affair with another man Arobin to satisfies her sexual need without love. The true is that the sexual passion is hidden in the author’ s words. When Robert comes back, she cannot curb her feelings but again, under the convention, Robert left again which leads her suicide indirectly.

It is a tragedy, but you want to carry forward her soul. As a woman, she doesn’t need to take care of the family, but to follow her will. Her friend Lassey are her own friend because she is free in music which encourages Edna. At the end of the novel, the sentence, “ and you call yourself an artist! What pretensions, Madame! The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies.” When she choose to the sea, she set free her soul, transcend herself.

The doctor’ s words explain the thoughts clearly: “It seems to be a provision of Nature; a decoy to secure mothers for the race. And Nature takes no account of moral consequences, of arbitrary conditions which we create, and which we feel obliged to maintain at any cost.” Edna wants to do everything she wants, it seems impossible. It just the dreams. Only when you want to be with nature, caring nothing. Edna hopes to be enter the spirit of the sea. So she does.

The novel mention some scenes that really impressed me. Like the lover on the beach and the old women who wears a block clothes. “ The lovers were just entering the grounds of the pension. They were leaning toward each other as the wateroaks bent from the sea. There was not a particle of earth beneath their feet.” Edna expresses her hatred towards marriage and feels sad when she saw the peaceful family. And the novel mentions the mothers’ duty many times, like the child who danced on the party expressing the natural responsibility.

But when it reminds me of Schopenhauer, I believe that the death is not the tragedy. Edna’ s death is her total freedom and she reborn and gain her soul again. Nobody would understand her, but she is still irrevocable. Schopenhauer writes, “欲望以两种方式来表现，一个方式是自我保存，这叫“生存意志”，是最基本的。还有一个方式是繁衍后代，这叫“生殖意志” . In the novel , Women no need to give birth to a baby, like an unsolved issue. With the appetence, she will never gain free. She left her children. She chooses to death, which exactly again endow her life the new meaning and another journey. In this way, I think the Robert is a tragedy character. He obey the social conference, and does not want to break through the module. The love awakens Edna, but tortures the man that Edna loved.