Protagonist of Kate Chopin\'s Book, the Awakening,

¶ … protagonist of Kate Chopin's book, The Awakening, Edna Pontellier, starts a one way voyage to find herself. A young wife and mother living in New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century makes surprising discoveries about who she is, abut what is essential and what is not. As she explains to her friend, Mrs. Ratignolle, there are things that are far more important to someone than one's own life. The finding of her true self will cost Edna one "unessential" possession in the end: her life, but she proved the trip worth the cost. She chooses to distance herself from everything she knew before in order to gain the clarity and the objectivity she needed to explore the new world within.

Although, Edna's marriage to Leonce Pontellier was a conflict in itself, it was nothing out of the ordinary for the first six years. A young girl who dreams of the great tragedian whose picture she has on the wall, meets a real man and marries him. This is a rather ordinary situation in a girl's life. The conflict apparently marks the transition from illusion to real life.

Even Edna's decision to marry the young man based on her wish to spite her father and older sister does not appear to be more that the usual revolt in a young person's life. A young Edna takes the "right decision," enrolling in the cohort of married women, taking their rightful place at the right time, fulfilling their duties and destinies: "As the devoted wife of a man who worshiped her, she felt she would take her place with a certain dignity in the world of reality, closing the portals forever behind her upon the realm of romance and dreams" (Chopin).

Music plays a role in Edna's process of awakening, too. Mademoiselle Reisz, who devoted her life to music, plays an important part at this stage of Edna's transformation. Her performance at the piano suddenly awakens Edna's soul, striking its very chords, instead of just bringing up the usual "material pictures which she thought would gather and blaze before her imagination" (Chopin, 43).

Edna's answer to Mademoiselle Reisz' interpretation of Chopin is a physical one: "the young woman was unable to answer, she pressed the hand of the pianist convulsively" (idem). The transfer back from the world of image to the physical world is suggested here with violence. Edna continues to discover herself, with soul and, more importantly, with body. She thought she would enter the world of reality once she got married, but she is starting to realize she did nothing but take a short brake from a world of dreaming.

Indeed, Edna's life looks like she is drifting in and out of a dream. The physical world overtakes her from time to time. One of those moments is when in the middle of a daydream, she finds herself swimming farther away than the rest of the swimmers, amazed at the how easy it was. For a moment, like in anticipation of the end, she looks back at the shore and thinks she is going to die out there, alone. The first encounter with death comes as a result of her loosing her faith in her own capacity. Next, she lies in a hammock and her own body speaks to her again. She finds desire. Robert, the twenty-six-year-old son of Madame Lebrun, the owner of the summer houses, keeps her company, in silence: "No multitude of words could have been more significant than those moments of silence, or more pregnant with the first-felt throbbings of desire" (Chopin, 49).

The moral aspect of Edna's return to herself comes up again and again. She is a married woman, mother of two boys. In order to go on the search for her own identity, she needs to free herself from everything in the past, including her responsibilities that came with a family. Surprisingly, the narrator shows her giving away her rights to decide in the matter of her own destiny. This is exactly the opposite to what the reader would expect her to do. One should think that a woman whose life did not belong to herself, who depended on others for most of her life, would find her own path by taking her destiny into her own hands. On the contrary, in order to overcome the moral side of the matter, Edna is shown here acting "as if she had placed herself in alien hands for direction, and freed her soul of responsibility" (Chopin, 55).

Edna's awakening has something to do with love, but it does not appear to be entirely due to the passion of love. She has Madame Ratignolle, and Madam Reisz around her, whose presence already brings up features of her personality that she left unexplored until then. She finds herself trapped in her marriage to "the best husband in the world"(Chopin), but she is already aspiring to change ways. She fights to find a way to deal with the novelty of "an indescribable oppression which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness"(Chopin). Her infatuation with Robert Lebrun come thus in a fertile soil, but it is not the generator of her transformation. It is a mere prop on the way she will eventually walk alone.