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

LeBlancs Gender Criticism of Chopins The AwakeningTomorrow marks thirty years since the Roe vs. Wade decision that gave women a reproductive choice in America. The occasion reminds me that women are continuously struggling to attain and maintain various levels of freedom. Elizabeth LeBlancs gender criticism of The Awakening---a novel produce 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 cleaning womans choices, actions and attitudes may be construed as the attempts of a woman trap in a sexually (in)different world 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 sexuality and constitutes herself as subject (238). The use of the word trapped connotes a state of being cornered, with few choices and at the mercy of someone else. At fi rst, Edna does seem trapped to a drone existence of bourgeois Creole society. But once she was initiated into the world of female love and ritual, (247) she began seeking fulfillment and selfhood outside of marriage and motherhood (244). Her gravitation toward a woman-centered existence, outside of culturally be spaces, is an act of self-reconstruction. For example, at the risk of damaging her reputation, she rejects the obligation of her social class to host callers. This is a figurative loosening of the ties that bound her to a tradition of postponement for life to happen. She defies that tradition 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 practices that suggest but stop short of sexual encounters. One such practice is finding solace in a woman who already lives on the margins of socie ty, Mademoiselle Reisz, who LeBlanc suggests is the actual lesbian in this narrative. Edna, LeBlanc writes, is drawn to her whenever she falls into despondency and hopelessness because Reiszs music penetrated Ednas full-length being like an effulgence, warming 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 nation of male tradition and meaningless codes (252). Edna learns not to define herself in relation to her familial attachments, such as mother or wife.