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

Choice of Lifestyle in Kate Chopins The alterOne of many poignant themes in Kate Chopins The Awakening is Edna Pontelliers fundamental choice of lifestyle -- the choice of dedication to the aesthete, the seclusion of art (as represented by Mademoiselle Reisz), or devotion to the all-consuming delegate of becoming a domestic goddess (as Madame Ratignolle has done). Considered mutually exclusive not whole by Chopin but by American society as a whole, the role of the housewife leaves little room for the serious pursuit of art. As evidenced in Helen Watterson Moodys contextual document The mechanic and Marriage, The woman must decided, then, whether to pursue her chosen art or to get married will make her happier. The plethora of demands of the successful artistic lifestyle, which includes near unassailable concentration on ones craft, the time and space to truly create, and the solitude needed to express ones essential egotism simply was not compatible with nineteenth century i deals of domesticity. Edna Pontellier, unwilling to try to the relative asceticism of art and equally incapab...