4.7–Sample Analysis of a Novella

Emerson Jones
Dr. Clough
ENGL 203
30 June 2021

Freedom and Confinement in the Settings of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

As stated in the sample prompt, the student has correctly formatted the heading in MLA style. The student’s name is listed first, followed by the instructor’s name, course title, and date. These headings should be aligned flush left. The title, as shown here, should be centered.

Kate Chopin’s famous novella, The Awakening, opens with the description of two caged birds, a green and yellow parrot and a mockingbird, which hang outside the main door of an upscale beach resort for the entertainment of its guests. As if in warning to the spirit of freedom and sensuality which the ocean awakens in that of the caged animal, the parrot is Chopin’s first “character” to speak within the story, shouting, “Allez vous-en!” or “Go away!” Chopin continues to use the symbol of the bird within her story, but she also makes great use of the settings in which the action of her story takes place; mainly Grand Isle and the city of New Orleans. In her novella, The Awakening, Kate Chopin utilizes these settings to develop both the theme of freedom versus confinement as well as the awakening spirit within her main character, Edna Pontellier.

Bravo for translating French to English (“Allez vous-en!” means “Go away!”)!

Set within Chopin’s own time period, the late 19th century, the novella begins at Grand Isle in Louisiana where Edna Pontellier and her family are spending the summer. Her husband, Léonce, is from a well-to-do Creole family and takes good care of Edna and their two boys, providing them with the best that money can buy. Though he is kind to her, Edna realizes that her life lacks freedom, passion, and independence. Her summer at Grand Isle and her friendship with Robert Lebrun, the resort owner’s son, awakens within her a desire to get to know who she really is inwardly. When the summer is over and they return to their home in New Orleans, she begins to defy the norms of the high society she is a part of by simply doing as she pleases. She chooses to spend more time painting or reading, and in turn neglects both her household and social duties, even going out on Tuesdays when she is routinely expected to remain home to receive social callers. Edna realizes that she was in love with Robert and visits her friends from Grand Isle in an effort to remember Robert as he is away in Mexico. He returns, declares that he went away because he loves her and he cannot have her because she is married and “not free” (Chapter XXXVI), then leaves again. Edna is heartbroken, realizing that she is not able to escape the confinement of matrimony and, most especially, motherhood. Instead of living a life that she does not desire and to save her sons from the heartache of their mother living a life of defiance, she returns to Grand Isle and swims into the ocean, never to return.

Notice how this whole paragraph provides a summary of the main actions of the novella, as well as some of the main characters. This summary is important to orient the reader and make sure that later references to important locations, actions, and characters are easier to follow. This essay author tells us enough about the novella that we understand what is being analyzed, but they don’t give us so much detail that the whole paper becomes a chapter-by-chapter summary. In summarizing events that occur over the course of the novella, page or chapter numbers do not need to be provided.

Grand Isle is a narrow island along the coast of Louisiana where wealthy Creole families, like Chopin’s fictional Pontelliers, could spend their summers to escape cramped city life. It is in this oceanside setting, and alongside “the openness and vitality of the Creoles” (Jones 109), in which the story of Edna’s internal “awakening” begins. Chapter VI explains this as a “certain light [that] was beginning to dawn dimly within her,” as she walked down to the beach with Robert one day. Chopin describes the ocean itself as seductive and “inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation... The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding in its soft, close embrace” (Chapter VI). This relaxed oceanside setting, the seduction of the sea, and Edna’s freedom from her everyday routine in the city combine with the openness of the Creoles she is vacationing amongst to give “her an awareness of the person she is beneath her social mask” (Jones 110). Raised in a strict Presbyterian home in land-locked Kentucky, Edna is at first shocked by the freedom of expression of the Creole culture she married into and fully experiences on Grand Isle. She was not used to, for example, talking openly of pregnancy or allowing a friend, man or woman, to show physical affection. Edna uses this oceanside, Creole freedom to contemplate the present and future state of her life and realizes the ways in which her role as a wife and mother in New Orleans’s high society confines her.

Generally, chapter numbers do not need to be given; however, the copy of the text the student is using here does not have page numbers, so chapter numbers are provided to help the reader find the direct quote.

This setting also influences certain events that occur while she is there; namely, her emotional response to Mademoiselle Reisz’s piano playing, her growing relationship with Robert, and finally learning how to swim. These events highlight both Edna’s internal awakening and the freedom and independence she is able to taste while staying on Grand Isle. As Chopin uses this setting to develop her theme of freedom versus confinement, she also develops Edna’s character immensely within this first setting. In Chapter XIV, just before Robert abruptly leaves for Mexico and the summer ends, Edna contemplates this development and wonders what it was about that particular summer at Grand Isle that changed everything for her. She realizes that “she herself – her present self – was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored and changed her environment, she did not yet suspect” (Chapter XIV). Edna thrives in this setting and is undergoing a form of internal metamorphosis.

Especially for a topic sentence, reiterate the specific setting to which the essay author is referring because setting is a general term. This will also give the paragraph a distinct focus.

Edna’s return to her everyday life in the city was like walking back into a cage after the freedom she felt at the ocean. New Orleans in the late 19th century was similar in structure as it is today with homes and buildings crammed together, contrasting the vast openness of the ocean and its shores. And, unlike at Grand Isle where she was surrounded solely by elite Creole society, New Orleans included the stricter, more modest “American” high society. Albert Rhodes, in his 1873 article on “The Louisiana Creoles,” refers to these cultural differences “between France and America” and how the more somber-minded “American criticizes his Creole neighbor with severity” for their enthusiasm and things like going to the theater or listening to music on a Sunday (Rhodes 14). From her newly experienced freedom at the seaside, Edna returns to the busy world of New Orleans, characterized by the confinement of a crowded city, her strict routine, and the modest traditions of high society.

When discussing actions that happen within the book, use present tense. This is one example of past tense used when present tense is required. Please note: we have not marked all places in this essay where the tense should be changed.

At the beginning of Chapter XVII, Chopin describes the beautiful Pontellier home on Esplanade Street and claims that it was “the envy of many women whose husbands were less generous than Mr. Pontellier.” He is back in his element, ready to play the social games and keep up with “les convenances,” as he walks about his house examining his fine possessions, “chiefly because they were his” (Chapter XVII). Edna, on the other hand, feels no connection to her home when she returns. Chopin describes it as “an alien world which had suddenly become antagonistic” (Chapter XVIII). Surrounded by her husband’s prized possessions, she feels more like one herself. Chopin’s readers did not get to see Edna in her New Orleans home before her enlightening summer in Grand Isle, but the way in which she responds to it when she returns clearly demonstrates that there was no room for independence or freedom here as there was during the summer at the beach.

Specify who “He” is in the second sentence of this paragraph; we understand that you’re referring to Mr. Pontellier but since his name appears in the quotation and this is your own sentence, the use of the pronoun is jarring. Try “Léonce,” instead, for specificity and for variation in diction.

As Edna begins to test the boundaries of her caged life by ignoring her social duties and spending time doing “as she liked and to feel as she liked” (Chapter XIX), she can transport herself back to the way she felt on the Isle. One day, as she is painting, she “could hear again the ripple of the water, the flapping sail. She could see the glint of the moon upon the bay, and could feel the soft, gusty beating of the hot south wind. A subtle current of desire passed through her body…” (Chapter XIX). Through the act of painting, an activity she feels passionate about, she feels again how she felt on Grand Isle. For Edna, the ocean represents freedom. New Orleans, however, becomes a confined freedom. Even when she does as she likes, sees whom she likes, and even moves into a small home of her own to claim her independence, with the second leaving of Robert, she realizes that she will never be free and allowed true independence there. What seems at first to Edna to be a further awakening and development of her true self is instead impeded by her city-based setting and the confinement it represents in her life as a married upper-class woman and mother.

The penultimate sentence in this paragraph has a lot of big events—Edna’s move, Robert’s return and departure—that need to be unpacked. Develop this paragraph (perhaps even a paragraph per event) to explain how these moments of resistance by Edna relate to and develop your thesis argument.

By focusing on Chopin’s use of setting within her story, one can see how Edna views Grand Isle as a place of freedom and New Orleans as one of confinement. Each setting has a different effect on Edna as she attempts to “find herself” throughout the course of the narrative. Edna realizes the difficulty of trying to break tradition, especially after you have already immersed yourself within it. Just as the title of the novella suggests, different settings have the ability to “awaken” something within a person, to affect a life’s course of events, and to lead to a change in how one views oneself. As Mademoiselle Reisz reminds Edna, “The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth” (Chapter XXVII). Just as Chopin began her novella with a bird, she ends it with one. The caged bird in the beginning contrasts the free bird that Edna sees back at Grand Isle trying to fly with a broken wing. Both of these birds, the caged and the free, are not at their healthiest, most natural state. And just as the settings of Grand Isle contrasted with New Orleans, Edna realizes that she does not want to belong to either. Instead, she chooses permanently the soft, close embrace of the ocean.

Avoid shifting into second person, as seen in the use of “you” in the third sentence of this paragraph. Instead refer either to Edna or “one,” as the essay writer did in the first sentence of this paragraph.

Works Cited

In the revision process, sometimes you end up not using the sources you thought you would. Before submitting your essay, double check to make sure that your Works Cited list accurately reflects the in-text citation and vice versa; otherwise, it looks like you are still using information from a source (in this case, Lieberman) but have not cited it in the text, and that means. . . plagiarism.