The Awakening, Ch. 5-9

I really like The Awakening so far. It’s a real story with a plot line and is easier to comprehend than The Darkness, for example. It’s also not just intense imagery with every word meaning something else. So for that, I think it’s a good novel.

One of the interesting parts of The Awakening is a symbol not being represented by something skewed, but rather the symbols are the people. For example, women like Madame Ratignolle and her beauty represent the feminism ideal. That is also the focus of chapters 5-9; it concentrates on two opposite figures, Madame Ratignolle and Edna Pontellier.

Madame Ratignolle is characterized a mother-women who is fully devoted to her children; her identity is them. She is this loving mother that will inconvenience or possibly endanger herself for her kids. For example, Madame Ratignolle is not supposed to lift her children, as she is pregnant, and everyone knows it. It is because she constantly talks about her “condition”, her pregnancy that everyone is aware of what her doctor not to do. Her children and husband tie up her whole world. She wants to be close to her child, in spite that it could put her unborn baby in danger.

Contrasting to Madame Ratignolle is Edna. Edna is the type of women that is constantly trying to put on a good show for the Creole culture. For example, in the previous chapters we saw Madame Ratignolle making clothes for her children, and Edna picked up a piece of cloth and follow suit. She does this because she doesn’t want to get a rise out of the other women; she is the one conforming.

Perhaps the most significant difference between the two women is Madame Ratignolle being a Creole and Edna isn’t. They have been raised in two different cultures. Madame Ratignolle knows how to act within that culture and the so-called “rules” of being mother-women. Edna on the other hand is an outsider, and is still trying to figure out who she is.