Awakening Key Quotes

Question 1

Contemporary critic on TA

Answer 1

“unholy imaginations and unclean desires’.

Question 2

Cather and love

Answer 2

‘they are the victims of the over-idealisation of love.’

Question 3

Genovese on women in marriages

Answer 3

‘marriages cast women as the objects of others’

Question 4

Genovese on Chopin aim in TA

Answer 4

‘she wrote of the female human condition.”

Question 5

Walker on Edna’s isolation

Answer 5

“a woman who does not belong to her time, but it is equally important to realise that she does not belong to her place.”

Question 6

Bender on motherhood

Answer 6

‘The Awakening begins and ends with the essential fact of motherhood.”

Question 7

Birnbaum on race

Answer 7

“her sexual awakening is a white middle class luxury.”

Question 8

Birnbaum on racial appropriation

Answer 8

appropriation of the “rhetoric of racial oppression”

Question 9

Wolff on female expression

Answer 9

“…a culture that construes a woman’s self-expression as a violation of sexual ‘purity’
“a measure of society’s failure to allow its women a language of the their own.”

Question 10

Wolff on female sexuality

Answer 10

“their sexuality may exist only as a component of ‘motherhood’.”

Question 11

Wolff on Ratignolle

Answer 11

“Mme. Ratignolle, the ‘sensuous Madonna,’

Question 12

Taylor on Edna walking in streets alone

Answer 12

“ Chopin transformed that European figure of the…male flaneur into a complex ‘daring and defying’ female walker’

Question 13

Pizer on Ratignolle’s purpose

Answer 13

“Adele Ratignolle is clearly a foil to Edna in that she glories in the role of mother-woman’.”

Question 14

Pizer on Edna’s suicide

Answer 14

Edna remains trapped in these roles and can only escape them, she believes, in death

Question 15

Pizer on Edna as a mother

Answer 15

Edna’s children “constitute an insurmountable obstacle in her effort to live a free and independent existence.”

Question 16

Le Blanc on Edna as subversive

Answer 16

“Edna maintains a subversive presence in the patriarchy.”

Question 17

Le Blanc on the sea

Answer 17

“As Edna’s metaphorical lesbian lover, the sea is perhaps the only source of fulfillment equal to her ‘unrequited longing”

Question 18

Schweitzer on Reisz

Answer 18

“The alternative to the ‘soul’s slavery’ of the ‘mother-woman’ is clearly represented by Mademoiselle Reisz”

Question 19

Beer on Edna walking on the street

Answer 19

Edna’s walking, “once she regains the city, is mimetic of masculine freedom of association.”

Question 20

Quotes on Love

Answer 20

‘Does she say to herself: ‘Go to! Here is a distinguished statesman with presidential possibilities; I shall proceed to fall in love with him.’
‘It was the first kiss of her life to which her nature had really responded. It was a flaming torch that kindled desire.’
“only you; no one but you. It was you who awoke me last summer out of a life-long, stupid dream.
‘…when he was to leave her for a comparatively long stay, she grew melting and affectionate.’

Question 21

Quotes on loss

Answer 21

‘Does he send you a message? Never a word. It is because he loves you, poor fool, and is trying to forget you, since you are not free to listen to him or to belong to him.”’
“I love you. Good-by–because I love you.”
Edna grew faint when she read the words.’
‘the reality was that they sat ten feet apart, she at the window, crushing geranium leaves in her hand and smelling them, he twirling around on the piano stool’

Question 22

Quotes on sexuality

Answer 22

‘The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.
‘The first few chords…sent a keen tremor down Mrs Pontellier’s spinal column’
‘dull pang of regret’
‘He did not say good night until she had become supple to his gentle, seductive entreaties.’

Question 23

Quotes on infidelity

Answer 23

“What would he think?” She did not mean her husband; she was thinking of Robert Lebrun’
‘her husband’s reproach looking at her from the external things around her which he had provided for her external existence.

Question 24

Quotes on women

Answer 24

‘“She’s got some sort of notion in her concerning the eternal rights of women”….”Has she been associating of late with a circle of pseudo-intellectual women - superspiritual beings?”
‘She comes of sound old Presbyterian Kentucky stock’
‘Woman, my dear friend, is a very peculiar and delicate organism’

Question 25

Quotes on masculinity

Answer 25

‘Mr Pontellier had been a rather courteous husband so long as he met a certain tacit submissiveness in his wife.

Question 26

Quotes on motherhood

Answer 26

‘fluttering about with extended, protecting wings’
‘Mrs Pontellier was not a mother-woman’
‘her soul’s slavery’

Question 27

Quotes on role of a wife

Answer 27

‘…looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage.’
‘Authority, coercion are what is needed…; the only way to manage your wife.”…The Colonel was perhaps unaware that he had coerced his own wife into her grave.’
‘she would give up the unessential, but she would never sacrifice herself for her children.’

Question 28

Quotes on marriage

Answer 28

‘Her husband seemed to her now like a person whom she had married without love as an excuse.’
“Religion, loyalty, everything would give way if only you cared.”
When she saw it lying there, she stamped her heel upon it, striving to crush it.

Question 29

Quotes on reputation

Answer 29

‘that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions’
‘She did not deem it worthwhile to go in search of any of the fashionable acquaintances from whom she had withdrawn herself.’

Question 30

Quotes on race

Answer 30

‘And she summoned a young black woman , whom she instructed’

Question 31

Quotes on identity/awakening

Answer 31

‘A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her’
‘She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.’
‘She felt like some new-born creature, opening its eyes in a familiar world that it had never known.’
‘She looked into the distance, and the old terror flamed up for an instant, then sank again.’
‘A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water.’

Question 32

Quotes on mental health/isolation

Answer 32

he felt the old…hopelessness which so often assailed her, which came upon her like an obsession

Question 33

Quotes on art

Answer 33

“And you call yourself an artist! What pretensions, Madame! The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies.”’

Question 34

Quotes on jealousy

Answer 34

‘ A vision–a transcendently seductive vision of a Mexican girl arose before her. She writhed with a jealous pang’
“Wrote to YOU?” repeated Edna in amazement, stirring her coffee absently.’

Question 35

Quotes on the past

Answer 35

‘”I knew him last summer at Grand Isle,”’

Question 36

Quotes on religion

Answer 36

‘perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman’

Question 37

Quotes on Edna

Answer 37

‘She was rather handsome than beautiful’

Question 38

Quotes on Arobin

Answer 38

not overburdened with depth or thought or feeling