Margit Stange’s Literary Criticism of Chopin’s The Awakening Essay

Margit Stanges Literary Criticism of Chopins The AwakeningKate Chopin created Edna Pontellier, but uncomplete the character nor her creator was divorced from the world in which Chopin lived. As a means to understand the choices Chopin gave Edna, Margit Stange evaluates The Awakening in the context of the feminist ideology of the of late nineteenth coke. Specifically, she argues that Edna is seeking what Chopins contemporaries denoted self-ownership, a notion that pivoted on sexual choice and voluntary motherhood (276). Stange makes a series of meaningful connections mingled with Kate Chopins dramatization of Edna Pontelliers awakening and the historical context of feminist thought that Stange believes influenced the novel. For example, she equates Ednas quest for financial independence with the late nineteenth centurys Married Womens Property Acts, which sought to give married women greater control over their property and earnings. Ultimately, Stange believes, Ednas awakening, he r acquisition of self-determination, comes from identifying and re-distributing what she owns, which Stange argues is her body, much as contemporary feminist thinkers discussed what she calls womens sexual exchange value (281). Additional references to reformers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, as well as the legal standards of femme seule and femme couverte buttress Stanges position that Ednas experiences are a reflection of historical reality, even if some of the equations are a bit rough. Chopin, Stange notes, is careful to separate Edna the wife from Edna the muliebrity Mrs. Pontellier becomes Edna in the text, and then Mrs. Pontellier once more when her sense of self-ownership again seems lost. Chopin... ...alls a moment of extreme maternal giving, Stanton argued for womens right to a public representative because al wizard woman goes to the gates of death to give life to every man that is born into the world no one can share her fears, no one ca n mitigate her pangs and if her heartache is greater than she can bear, alone she passes beyond the gates into the vast unknown (289). Chopin may have had a clearer grasp of the capacious hold of the rhetoric of motherhood than Stange acknowledges. Edna at the gates of death may be a woman caught in an evolving conception of self-ownership, burdened by the sorrow of realizing that she can only really own what she no longer wants, because what she does want is yet beyond her grasp. Ednas trap is indeed a historical reflection, a comment on the tumultuous, even violent, evolution of ideologies, expectations, choices, and realities.