Awakening, by Kate Chopin: Chapter 7

¶ … Kate Chopin's remarkable novel "The Awakening," Edna contemplates her ideals about life, love and remaining true to one's self, despite the conformity that typically changes one's nature. Edna is one who has always kept her true identity hidden, seen only by herself; a notion that is explained by the narrator as "the dual life -- that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions." (p. 35) The struggle between these two existences is the central conflict of the novel, and one that is explained at length by the plot.

Edna was never close to any females, which prevented her from developing deep friendships, which typically would have kept her from shutting out her innermost feelings. Women tend to tell their best girlfriend things they would never tell their husbands or their lovers -- men do not typically understand women and their emotional depths.

When Edna becomes friends with the Creole woman, Adele Ratignolle, for the first time she begins "to loosen a little the mantle of reserve that had always enveloped her." (p.35) This "mantle" as she calls it is a division she has built between what she does, and what she wants to do. Quite simply, she does what she feels is expected, because she didn't realize other women had the same impulses that she had.

Edna desired to have a passionate love, and passionate sex, and at that time, sexual revelation for women was virtually unheard of. But because of this new friendship she began with Adele, Edna also began to open herself up, and share some of her more intimate thoughts.

More importantly, she begins to acknowledge them out loud to herself -- she admits to herself that she had hoped for something more in her marriage, but that she had merely grown "fond of her husband, realizing…that no trace of passion or excessive and fictitious warmth colored her affection." (p.47) Even her children, whom she is "fond of…in an uneven, impulsive way" are somewhat of a "responsibility which she had blindly assumed and for which Fate had not fitted her." (Pp.

47-48) The idea that a mother could spend an entire summer away from her children and only miss them with an "occasional intense longing" seems outwardly inexcusable, until Edna begins to realize that other women also have these same emotions. (p.

48) When she finally begins to trust Adele enough to begin her release - when she finally begins to confide in someone she trusts completely, the feelings of relief that come with her confessions cause her to be "intoxicated with the sound of her own voice and the unaccustomed taste of candor." (p. 48) It is, in essence, her "first breath of freedom" that she has ever felt -- probably in her entire life. (p.

48) Her failed relationships with other women in her life -- her younger sister Janet with whom she "had quarreled a good deal through force of unfortunate habit" and her older sister, Margaret who was "matronly and dignified"; as well as the "self-contained" girls that she had occasionally developed friendships with all contributed to the extreme "reserve of her own character." (p.

43) Her journey of self-discovery continues as her summer progresses, and her outward life begins to blend into her inward life, until she is able to live both as one life. It is because of these true feelings, the real emotions that she has once she opens up her soul that she continues to be true to her soul. Women for centuries, and even now deal with the constraints of what is expected of them as opposed to what they actually want to feel, or be, or do. So often, most.