Edna s Awakening
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David Caradine once wrote, "Kate Chopin wrote for many years and her popularity was extreme until critical disapproval of her novel, The Awakening." (Caradine) Edna Pontillier, the protagonist from Kate Chopin's The Awakening, is a woman whose desires overcome her responsibilities. Edna's persona is perceived as the unconventional woman who defies the stereotype of women in that time period. Through her abandonment of her obligations to her family, her affairs, and her suicide. Through a series of experiences, or "awakenings," Edna becomes a shockingly independent woman.
While Edna was lost in her unconventional slumber, her personal desires, which she thought were lost, "re-awakened" inside her to what she calls in the novel as, "The Real World." In her fantasy she finds a life of love, sex, art, abandonment, and affairs. She abandons her family in order to have affairs with other men, one being Robert Lebrun. She is aided in her well intentioned crime by her close personal friends, who encourage Edna to abandon her family and pursue her own "awakening" by succumbing to her desires. It is described in the novel that Edna's marriage with Leonc is a pure accident...