Choice of Lifestyle in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening Essay -- Chopin Awa

Choice of Lifestyle in Kate Chopins The AwakeningOne of many another(prenominal) poignant themes in Kate Chopins The Awakening is Edna Pontelliers fundamental pickaxe of lifestyle -- the choice of dedication to the aesthete, the solitude of artifice (as represented by Mademoiselle Reisz), or devotion to the all-consuming task of becoming a domestic help goddess (as Madame Ratignolle has d cardinal). Considered mutually exclusive not only by Chopin but by American society as a whole, the role of the housewife leaves petite room for the serious pursuit of art. As evidenced in Helen Watterson sullens contextual document The Artist and Marriage, The woman must decided, then, whether to heed her chosen art or to marry will make her happier. The embarrassment of demands of the successful artistic lifestyle, which includes near absolute concentration on ones craft, the time and space to truly create, and the solitude needed to declaim ones essential self simply was not congruous w ith nineteenth century ideals of domesticity. Edna Pontellier, unwilling to submit to the relative asceticism of art and equally incapab...