LeBlanc’s Gender Criticism of Chopin’s The Awakening :: Chopin Awakening

LeBlancs Gender Criticism of Chopins The awakenTomorrow marks thirty years since the Roe vs. Wade determination that gave women a reproductive choice in America. The occasion reminds me that women are constantly struggling to attain and maintain various levels of liberty. Elizabeth LeBlancs gender check of The Awakening---a novel published before women acquired suffrage---highlights one such freedom the freedom to live on ones own terms.The discussion delineates how Kate Chopins tale of one womans choices, actions and attitudes may be construed as the attempts of a woman trapped in a sexu eachy (in)different humankind to reconstitute herself as lesbian (241). LeBlanc clarifies that Edna is a metaphorical lesbian who creates a narrative or textual space in which she interrogates accepted norms of textuality and sexual activity and constitutes herself as subject (238). The use of the word trapped connotes a demesne of being cornered, with few choices and at the mercy of someon e else. At first, Edna does front trapped to a drone existence of bourgeois Creole society. only once she was initiated into the world of female love and ritual, (247) she began seeking fulfillment and selfhood impertinent of marriage and motherhood (244). Her gravitation toward a woman-centered existence, outside of culturally specify spaces, is an act of self-reconstruction. For example, at the risk of damaging her reputation, she rejects the obligation of her social curriculum to host callers. This is a figurative loosening of the ties that bound her to a custom of waiting for life to happen. She defies that impost and, in doing so, restructures her existence as a woman.Edna progressively moves away from all-things-traditional, or culturally predefined, into a space all her own. As a metaphorical lesbian, she engages in a variety of woman-identified physical exercises that purpose but stop short of sexual encounters. One such practice is finding solace in a woman who alre ady lives on the margins of society, Mademoiselle Reisz, who LeBlanc suggests is the actual lesbian in this narrative. Edna, LeBlanc writes, is drawn to her whenever she falls into disconsolateness and hopelessness because Reiszs music penetrated Ednas whole being like an effulgence, warm up and brightening the dark places of her soul (Chopin 103). It is she, who describes herself as captivated by Edna, who fosters in Edna a sense of the possibilities for joy and fulfillment outside the realm of male tradition and meaningless codes (252). Edna learns not to define herself in relation to her familial attachments, such as mother or wife.