Awakening Key Quotes Flashcards
Contemporary critic on TA
“unholy imaginations and unclean desires’.
Cather and love
‘they are the victims of the over-idealisation of love.’
Genovese on women in marriages
‘marriages cast women as the objects of others’
Genovese on Chopin aim in TA
‘she wrote of the female human condition.”
Walker on Edna’s isolation
“a woman who does not belong to her time, but it is equally important to realise that she does not belong to her place.”
Bender on motherhood
‘The Awakening begins and ends with the essential fact of motherhood.”
Birnbaum on race
“her sexual awakening is a white middle class luxury.”
Birnbaum on racial appropriation
appropriation of the “rhetoric of racial oppression”
Wolff on female expression
“…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.”
Wolff on female sexuality
“their sexuality may exist only as a component of ‘motherhood’.”
Wolff on Ratignolle
“Mme. Ratignolle, the ‘sensuous Madonna,’
Taylor on Edna walking in streets alone
“ Chopin transformed that European figure of the…male flaneur into a complex ‘daring and defying’ female walker’
Pizer on Ratignolle’s purpose
“Adele Ratignolle is clearly a foil to Edna in that she glories in the role of mother-woman’.”
Pizer on Edna’s suicide
Edna remains trapped in these roles and can only escape them, she believes, in death
Pizer on Edna as a mother
Edna’s children “constitute an insurmountable obstacle in her effort to live a free and independent existence.”
Le Blanc on Edna as subversive
“Edna maintains a subversive presence in the patriarchy.”
Le Blanc on the sea
“As Edna’s metaphorical lesbian lover, the sea is perhaps the only source of fulfillment equal to her ‘unrequited longing”
Schweitzer on Reisz
“The alternative to the ‘soul’s slavery’ of the ‘mother-woman’ is clearly represented by Mademoiselle Reisz”
Beer on Edna walking on the street
Edna’s walking, “once she regains the city, is mimetic of masculine freedom of association.”
Quotes on Love
‘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.’
Quotes on loss
‘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’
Quotes on sexuality
‘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.’
Quotes on infidelity
“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.
Quotes on women
‘“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’
