Option 4

Throughout The Awakening I could feel myself becoming angry with Edna. I literally wanted to shake Edna and say “What are you thinking?? Why are you ruining everything you have??” and then I realized, this was me wanting to shake myself. I felt connections with Edna throughout the book specifically in the second half when she started to defy her role as a wife. I however am only 19 and do not have that same experience of being a wife although I felt the same as her in the sense that we were given everything on a silver platter and while walking through the motions one day we stopped, looked in the mirror and made a change because that was not who we were meant to be.

In high school, I was an athlete. I was given the athletic ability, I was given the motivation by my parents to be the best I could be, and I was even given the opportunity by my coaches to be on older teams to push me to be better. While Edna had the perfect husband, the beautiful house, the handsome looks, and wonderful sons. These things should be satisfying to the both of us however we both walked through life not questioning whether this was the thing that made us happy, we simply were just filling the role that society had given us, feeling in a way trapped. Every day, we would both follow the role that society had given us and one day we just stopped. It was no longer what we were meant to do, we awoke and began a new life completely leaving the old in the dust. While Edna was going through these changes, people had definitely taken notice even Victor who stated, “Some way she doesn’t seem like the same woman” (Chopin 59), and whether this was positive or negative people had noticed. It was a way we carried ourselves differently, priorities changed, friends groups changed. Our only difference is where Edna chose to go into the ocean because she could not handle the change, while I went to college in a new state and embraced the change.