PAPER Topics

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The novel, The Awakening, by Kate Chopin is set in the late nineteenth century, in Louisiana. This is a place and time for women to submit themselves to the wants and needs of husbands and families. The protagonist, Edna Pontellier, isn’t co ....

Middle of Term Paper
... figures. Mademoiselle Ratignolle is the ideal Grand Isle woman, a home-loving mother and a good wife, and Mademoiselle Reisz as the old, unmarried, childless, musician who devoted her life to music, rather than a man. Feeling that neither of their lifestyles were suitable and lacking the ability to create a model of her own, Edna in the closing of The Awakening commits suicide by walking into the ocean. Perhaps if there had been a more well rounded woman figure in Edna’s life, she wouldn’t have felt the life she craved was, “...an undefined, unexpressed, ineffable life that she cannot articulate or shape” (Spangler). In witnessing other ...