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

Margit Stange’s Literary Criticism of Chopin’s The Awakening Margit Stange makes a series of meaningful connections between Kate Chopin’s dramatization of Edna Pontellier’s â€Å"awakening† and the historical context of feminist thought which Stange believes influenced the novel. Part of understanding Edna’s motives and Chopin’s thinking are Stange’s well-chosen references to the contemporary ideology that shapes Edna’s thinking and her choices. Stange argues that Edna is seeking the late-nineteenth-century conception of self-ownership, which pivots on â€Å"voluntary motherhood.† Edna’s awakening, her acquisition of self-determination, comes from identifying and re-distributing what she owns, which Stange argues is her body. For example, Edna’s skin indicates early in the novel her more complex relationship with her husband. Her sunburned hands seem to indicate a woman who has performed a labor of some necessity, therefore making her â€Å"unrecognizable† as the wife of a respected and prosperous businessman. At the same time, those who see her and know who she is are reminded of Leonce’s status by the tan his wife has acquired while visiting an elite resort (279-80). The clash between the appearance of labor and leisure in Edna’s form gradually comes to favor the look of leisure, but it is Edna who increasingly defines how she spends her time, and what constitutes leisure. By casting off the duties that come with being Mrs. Pontellier, Edna is devaluing the â€Å"currency† with which her husband buys respectability and esteem. By withholding sexual and social favors, Edna ruptures Leonce’s privileged comfort and establishes herself as femme seule, literally providing for herself with an independent income (282, 286). Stange links this situat... ...ity. Certainly that is an effective material argument, and further exploration of contemporary criticisms of birth control, from both men and women, could provide even greater context for understanding how women regarded motherhood and to what extent they saw it as â€Å"voluntary.† But Stange herself points to a profound statement of Stanton’s that more clearly defines the power mothers wielded socially, and the great loss of self-ownership motherhood entailed, both of which Edna Pontellier came to understand and control. Describing what Stange calls a â€Å"moment of extreme maternal giving,† Stanton wrote â€Å"‘alone [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 can mitigate her pangs; and if her sorrow is greater than she can bear, alone she passes beyond the gates into the vast unknown’† (289).