Seminar paper from the year 2012 in the subject English Language
and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of
Heidelberg (Anglistisches Seminar), language: English, abstract: 1.
Introduction Kate Chopin s the Awakening and especially its ending
has been interpreted primarily in two different ways: There are
those who believe that the ending, Edna s suicide, is Edna s final
awakening (among them inter alia Rosowski, cf. "The Novel of
Awakening." p.47) and there are those who argue that the ending is
Edna s final realization of her failure to find a place in society
(for example Lattin, cf. "Childbirth and Motherhood." p.44; Solomon
cf. "Characters as Foils to Edna." p.119). But beyond these
contrasting angles of interpretation, there is one common belief:
The Awakening is Edna s struggle to find her own identity, her
genuine place in society or, in short, herself: One of these days
...] I m going to pull myself together for a while and think try to
determine what character of a woman I am; for, candidly, I don t
know. By all the codes which I am acquainted with, I am a
devilishly wicked specimen of the sex. But some way I can t
convince myself that I am. I must think about it. (p.103) As the
figures of Adele Ratignolle and Mlle. Reisz show, it is, after all,
possible for women to find an identity of their own. Patricia
Hopkins Lattin and Deborah E. Parker have argued that these two
women serve as role models for Edna. But both Lattin and Parker
fail to give a role model-based explanation of Edna s failure to
find her place in society. The question that shall be examined in
the following is therefore the contribution of Edna s role models
to her failure. It shall be analyzed why Edna, unlike Adele and
Mlle. Reisz, does not succeed in finding her place in society, and
why she also does not succeed to model herself on Adele or Reisz.
In order to answer this question, especially the differences
between Edna and each of her role-models shall be examined
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