The Significance of Birds in the Awakening
Through her passionate and dramatic voice, Kate Chopin narrated the heroic yet at the same time tragic story of Edna Pontellier, a twenty-eight-year-old wife of a New Orleans businessman. Upon finding herself dissatisfied with her marriage and limited life-style, Edna broke free from her vague, unconscious state of blindly devoted wife and mother and evolved into a state of awareness, in which she discovered her own identity and boldly acted on her desires for emotional and sexual satisfaction. Interesting enough, from the beginning where the brash parrot shrieked at the top of its voice towards the end where a bird with broken wings divided into the blue waves, Edna's struggle towards the achievement of individuality and spirituality was constantly accompanied by an unusual symbol-birds. In her masterpiece The Awakening, Kate Chopin ingeniously manipulated vivid aviary imageries to symbolize Edna's solitude and captivity, her ironic role as wife and mother, and her one and only ticket towards freedom. In the first line of the story, Chopin cunningly caught the audience's attention with the screeching ramblings of a brash parrot, which hollered repeatedly "Get out! Get out! Damn it!" and "spoke a language nobody understood." A
Not only the aviary images represented Edna's solitude and captivity, it also represented the ironic role that the society expected Edna to play. For instance, as Chopin stated, women at that time were expected to "[flutter] about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. . . [idolize] their children, [worship] their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels." In literature, wings were the ultimate symbol and allusion to freedom, liberty, and individuality; the bearer of wings was expected to value self-awareness and independence. However, in Edna's society, the impression of wings was twisted and manipulated: women were required to grow wings in order to fulfill their duties as wives and mothers so they could "idolize their children" and "worshipped their husbands," and at the same time it was also their obligation to give up their individuality, a quality which a wing-bearer valued the most. As a woman, Edna was also expected by her society to sacrifice her own consciousness and self-identity in exchange for a pair of wings, which brought her only duties and r
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Approximate Word count = 806
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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