The Awakening - Interpreting Literary Criticism

     Patricia S. Yaeger criticism of The Awakening by Kate Chopin degrades the character of Edna and her inability to speak for herself and expel a man's influence from her life. Yaeger emphasizes how Edna "can only act within some permutation of the subject-object relations her society has ordained for her", arguing that because of the time period, Edna will never fully experience a true "awakening" due to her pre-programed dependence on men. To support her claim, within the novel, once Edna does achieve freedom for her husband, she then turned to Alcée Arobin "in a way that pleased her at last, appealing to the animalism that stirred impatiently within her" (Chopin 106). Thus, even though Edna was able to isolate her life from that of her husbands, she still allowed her inner animal, or instincts, to guide her into befriending and romantically involving herself with Arobin. By comparing Edna's need for a man to "animalism", Chopin contradicts her message of feminism and freedom from male domination by suggesting that women are naturally in superior and yearn to have the controlling relationships that men implement. Similarly, Yaeger argues that Edna portrays the ideal that women have a natural incapability to speak on their own behalf as their language is "singular when it should be plural, masculine when it should be feminine, phantasmic when it should be open and dialectical." In addition, after Edna witnesses Adele give birth, "her speech was voicing the incoherency of her thought" (Chopin 151). Together, these assertions prove that Edna emphasizes women's inabilities to thrive without male influence as they lack the basic ability to compartmentalize and enforce structure in their conversations and their lives. Also, Yaeger argues that due to Edna's individual insufficiencies, she portrays a message opposite to that of what Chopin was trying to emphasize as she contradicts the characteristic of a strong, independent woman. In conclusion, Yaeger argues that within The Awakening, Edna's character is an erroneous portrayal of a woman who undergoes the revelation of feminism as her characteristics contradict that to which they try to illustrate.