Blog post 1

Kate Chopin's The Awakening features Edna Pontellier as the main character and is set in the Grand Isle off the coast of Louisiana during the nineteenth century. Edna is not your average house kept maiden and very unaccustomed to the creole culture that surrounds her. Even a somewhat close friend of hers, Adele Ratignolle, warns Robert not to get infatuated with her. Stating that," She is not one of us; she is not like us. She might make the unfortunate blunder of taking you seriously."(Chopin 26) This statement of hers really describes the dilemma of Edna's and how quite misplaced she is among so many people that are essentially like family and all know one another. She stands out like a sore thumb.

Edna's character is also much of a conflict because the more you read the more you start to agree that she is misplaced looking at how she acts and how she treats her family handles her responsibilities etcetera. It seems as though she does not even love her children and isn't quite fit nor ready to be locked into the job of being a wife and mother. Spending part of the summer with grandmother Pontellier feeling the following of her children," Their absence was a sort of relief, though she did not admit this, even to herself. It seemed to free her of a responsibility which she had blindly assumed and for which Fate had not fitted her."(Chopin 25) Her carelessness towards her children play a role in why her husband gets so angry at her somewhere deep down he does love this woman as his wife and the mother of her children but just because she carried and bore them doesn't fully make her a mother.