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1. In what sense The Awakening be (a) pro-feminist (b) anti-feminist? I understand why some readers could think of Edna as a woman who is trying to develop her own personality. I understand why Edna could be seen as a rebellious character who is tired of doing everything because of habits; tired of being an automaton, she decides to leave everything for the sake of her own freedom; but this is what a very unreliable narrator, whose eyes are infected with sympathies towards Edna�s behavior and with an unhealthy attempt of feminism, shows us. This is not what I see when I look at facts but what I see when I trust on an omniscient narrator whose words are peppered with personal oppinions and filters: I also understand why Edna may represent the reason why women cannot be free because we don�t know what to do with our freedom; our freedom may cost too much to a society based on patriarchal families. Edna may seem the perfect proof of women�s incapacity to live alone and having a reasonable criterion in contrast with Mme. Ratignolle�s perfect acceptance of social roles; but what I see is not only that; what I see when I look at Edna�s eyes is a person who accepted her role in society in a past and whose emotional frustrations lead her to a terrible psychological regression in which she starts to act not by reasoning at all; she experiences again the characteristic sexual awakening of teenagers and her regression, her huge depression, kills rather than awakening her; and nobody can help her. 2. Briefly trace the use of the symbol of sleeping and waking through the novel. Sleeping and waking seem to be points of inflection in the novella. Everytime Edna sleeps, she awakes vigorous, as if she had overcome a great difficulty, but what I think this symbol really means is what we will see in question five; that she�s still dreaming when awakens. She only enters her subconscious when sleeping and she does not have the tools to analyze nor understand what is happening to her; she only feels a huge amount of energy running all over her body which gets confused with trascendentalism and personal improvement. Feelings, symbols... dreams and reality get mixed and she gradually gets lost: [...] Edna, left alone in the little side room, loosened her clothes, removing the greater part of them. She bathed her face, her neck and arms in the basin that stood between the windows. She took off her shoes and stockings and stretched herself in the very center of the high, white bed. How luxurious it felt to rest thus in a strange, quaint bed , with its sweet country odor of laurel lingering about the sheets and mattress! [...]. She clapsed her hands easily above her head, and it was thus she fell asleep. [...] Edna arose quietly from the bed, and looking between the courtains of the window, she saw by the slanting rays of the sun that the afternoon was far advanced. Robert was out there under the shed, reclining in the shade against the sloping keel of the overturned boat. He was reading from a book. Tonie was no longer with him. [...] Then she went softly out of doors, and plucking an orange from the low-hanging bough of a tree, threw it to Robert, who did not know she was awake and up. Her huge problem with sleeping and awaking is that she is not doubting about her own perception of reality; no method, no awareness; no doubting, no conscience. Both Mlle. Reisz and Mme. Ratignolle seem to represent the two main alternative realities Edna could have followed as a woman. They are the two paradigmatic worlds in which Edna would like to fit, but she can do it in none of them. Edna realizes she will never be as HAPPY as she sees them. At the beginning, Edna was trying to be like Mme. Ratignolle; a housewife, a lovely mother worried about her children and in love with her husband, but she wasn�t like Ad�le: [...]; one of them was the embodiment of every womanly grace and charm. [...]. Her name was Ad�le Ratignolle.� [pp. 51] When Edna begins to feel she is not made for that role, she finds another one in Mlle. Reisz: �Oh, look!, there�s another way of doing it! Maybe I�m also an artist! I�ll try! But I�ll be a better one; I�ll be the artist who turns her back on society, and not the other way around; I�ll be the one who chooses her destiny; I�ll be a self-made woman� , and she tries to do it encouraged by Mademoiselle�s always kind words. But there is a problem there. Mlle. Reisz has no previous responsibilities towards a family; she is an artist from the beginning to the end; there are no crises in such dimension of the character. On the other hand, Edna has already tried another way of living and the only thing she is sure she knows is that she will never be happy that way; she wants to make a change but she doesn�t want to be another Natty Bumppo, another hybrid in the middle of nowhere; she wants to fit as an artist like Mlle. Reisz does even when Edna looks down on her. She uses Mlle. as a link to her platonic love, Robert, more than accepting her as an equal, as a friend: Both women are related to Edna as models of behavior more than as women like her. But this is not because of their lack of roundness as characters but because Mrs. Pontellier�s vanity looks down on others and it only lets her have more clear feelings towards the ones who seem to be weak and defenseless, like Mlle. Reisz, who seems to treat Edna as her muse. There are very few examples showing the same smelly reaction towards Mme. Ratignolle as Mrs. Pontellier is even less conscious of her looking down on Ad�le, but when Edna begins to think she is the master of her fate and the captain of her soul, her real depth turns up in a non-very-subtle way: As Edna seated herself at table with them she thought, �Better a dinner of herbs,� though it did not take her long to discover that it was no dinner of herbs, but a delicious repast, simple, choice, and in every way satisfying. [...] She was moved by a kind of commiseration for Madame Ratignolle, -a pity fo that colorless existence which never uplifted its possessor beyond the region of blind contentment, in which no moment of anguish ever visited her soul, in which she would never have the taste of life�s delirium.� [pp. 107] The paradogical situation is that even if Edna looks down on both women, she needs them; and as much as she looks down on them, as much as she has to look for their company, their help, and their approval. Edna is suffering an extremely well described psychological regression, so flashbacks are her mind�s open back door; they are like dreams, the only way to have a look at her subconscious, the only way to really know what is happening to her with no filters of our narrator, whose amorphous perception of reality lead us to wrong conclusions about the whole story. �Where were you going that day in Kentucky, walking through the grass?� �I don�t remember now. I was just walking diagonally across a big field. My sun-bonnet obstructed the view. I could see only the stretch of green before me, and I felt as if I must walk on forever, without comming to the end of it. I don�t remember whether I was frightened or pleased. I must have been entertained. �Likely as not it was Sunday�, she laughed; �and I was running away from prayers, from the Presbyterian service, read in a spirit of gloom by my father that chills me yet to think of.� � [pp. 60] From a symbolic point of view, her memories about the meadow represent her sexual awakening as a teenager, what would back what we have already said about her psychological regression, and the fact of running away from her father could be taken as a representation of overcoming the Elektra Complex. At the point in which the novella begins, she has transfered her father�s figure to L�once, who represents the reality from which she tries to escape, the one to be seen as a jailer, like her father. He is represented as impotent in another moment mentioned in question two, what gives her the possibility to do that transference without problems and to blame him (and her marriage) at the same time for her irrational feeling of anguish. On the other hand, Robert is like the cavalry officer who used to visit her father in Kentucky. Platonic love turns up, and absession and fond memories of a deformed and idelized Robert begin to live in Edna�s neurons not letting her think freely while our dear narrator tries to make us think that this state is �freedom� just because it implies escaping from social conventions, but she forgets to mention Edna�s entering in another jail called �feelings� and unconsciousness, the jail of trying to be an emersonian free person without the previous appropiate education. At least, Alc�e is the only man seen by Edna as a man instead of an ideal platonic love or a jailer; or maybe not?; maybe Mr. Arobin only represents a way of giving vent to her passions, dreams, and fantasies; only physical attraction, that�s all and..., if that is true... is he a man to Edna�s eyes?, or only a body with which to play �love games�? Maybe he represents a way of feeling attractive and �fool of life� without getting any extra responsibility. We will make it clearer in next point. 5. Why does Edna get involved with Alc�e Arobin? Edna has already transfered her father�s role to L�once and filled her idealistic emotional plane with Robert�s figure, but all her sensuality has still no physical recipient. Then, Alc�e Arobin turns up and feeds her vanity. He is not the man she could love at all but the one with whom she could have an affair and not feel guilty for it as there is no harm and no pain. What really happens is that she thinks there will be no harm and no pain for her as she doesn�t feel an emotional link towards Alc�e. Here, she is the leader of the relationship; she decides when and how, and her vanity grows and grows and makes her feel powerful. She is too ingenuous to notice she is not powerful at all in that situation; her idealistic, paternal, and sexual planes cannot coexist in the figures of men who �love� her and don�t know the existence of the other ones. At the end, trying not to get hurt with a real and complete relationship becomes the most harmful way of colliding with a reality she has been trying to avoid. Is Edna a heroine?, is she selfish? Labeling words which deform our perception of reality leading us to a state in which we feel we are able to judge other people. These word�s semantic connotations of salvation and condemnation give us the power we need to judge her. We could say she is a heroine as she fights against her society by trying to find her own place, or we could also say that she is a heroine only for being this novella�s main character. The point here is that she is not very different from us. She wants to live her own life forgetting about the others; no matter if she agreed to take care of a husband and two children in a past; that was the other Edna, the new one knows much more about life and about herself; this new Edna will fulfill her deepest necessities as a woman and as a human. She is going to be free of otherness; she is going to BE. Her gradual regression changes her perception of reality; reality bothers her, society seems to be a swallower of life who sucks every single breathe from her lungs and opresses her chest chocking her. She is distressed, lost, and alone. There is nothing more to do in life as she is not able to BE. Is this behavior selfish? Yes, it is. Taking care only about oneself at all costs, leaving a family alone, turning ones back on the cog-society we belonged to, and looking for one�s only pleasure and being is selfish, but there must be no judgement. There is a very big difference between what Edna experiences and what we are able to see from the outside of the jail she is trying to escape from; her jail; the one made of her own fantasies and dreams, and her very dangerous emotional and sexual frustraition hidden by a narrator who tries to induce us to seek ONLY in centrifugal directions when looking for blaming for her terrible story. She has suffered too much to be judged by us now, so I will only say that her behavior, her actions were selfish, but she was only trying to BE, which is our right and obligation as humans; she was only trying to do her duty as well as possible and she found no guides to do it without harming others OR herself.
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