The Awakening Post 3

The Awakening is full of gender equality issue that many of us have already blogged about, yet I can’t seem to get over the way Colonel talked about Edna. “Authority, coercion are what is needed. Put your foot down good and hard; the only way to manage a wife. Take my word for it.” (125)  Colonel tells Léonce that this is how he should be treating his daughter. The first two sentences are insulting enough to Edna, imply that she needs to be controlled and “managed” to be considered a good wife. The word choice was extremely harsh almost as if referring to Edna as a type of animal who needs to be managed.

When analyzing the last sentence of the quote “Take my word for it.” I began to think on what if Edna’s urge for independence wasn’t all that sudden. While Colonel makes it clear to Léonce that he controls Edna’s mother, it’s also easy to infer that Edna grew up watching her mother be bossed around by a man. Since in the beginning of The Awakening Edna always made references to the bird in the cage symbolizing that she feels trapped in her own life. We might be able to infer that she knew all along that she didn’t want to be like her mother.

 

 

The picture above is from the movie The Titanic, this is taken from the scene when rose is telling her mother that she does not want to marry the rich man, and act like the high society wife that her mother portrayed although she was unhappy. While the titanic was about Rose no longer caring about social status and being true to herself and being with not wealthy jack. I find the relation in The Awakening from Rose finds independence by doing what she truly wants not what her mother tells her to do. Just like Edna finds independence from becoming a woman who is not the housewife and not the woman who is controlled by her husband even though that’s how she was raised and that’s how she saw her mother get treated.