A Choice Of One's Own Will

Kate Chopin is an outstanding southern woman writer in the late 19th century America. Her main interests were music, reading and writing. She dressed unconventionally and smoked cigarettes long before smoking was an approved practice among women in her class. When in 1899 her novel The Awakening was published, she was censured both locally and nationally for its poisonous and "positively unseemly" theme. The St. Louis literary establishment refused to review the novel, the local library removed it from circulation. She died of a cerebral hemorrhage in August 1904. Not until 1950's, did the critics change their ideas towards this novel and acclaimed it as a perfect novel.This thesis will be mainly based on Existentialism and Schopenhauer's philosophy to exhibit Chopin's concerns about women's living condition——absurdity women face, alienation women feel, and the struggle for the authentic existence. Meanwhile, this thesis aims at exploring the ultimate meaning of human existence by means of an analysis of the ending of Edna in The Awakening, which exhibits Chopin's unique understanding of the human authentic existence in the world.My thesis consists of five parts as follows:Chapter One serves as a brief literary review of Kate Chopin and The Awakening. Then, the objectives and methodology are stated. The present study aims at providing a thorough and detailed interpretation of the novel from existentialist perspective so as to make a better understanding of its themes and Chopin's existentialist evaluation of human life.Chapter Two presents the methodology of this study——Existentialism, including the basic ideas of Existentialism, Existentialist representative Sartre and his main ideas of Existentialism, and the influences on the American literature. Existentialism holds that people are completely free to choose their actions and their actions determine their nature rather than the other way round. A key concept of Existentialism is that man is nothing but what he makes of himself. In the main, Existentialism is concerned with the individual whose quest for authentic selfhood focuses on the meaning of personal being. Existentialists have extensively talked about such themes as loneliness, alienation, anxiety, boredom, despair, nothingness and death, etc.Chapter Three explores the existentialist elements in The Awakening. It consists of three coherent aspects, i.e. sense of alienation, search for selfhood, and search for freedom. Firstly, Existentialists believe that man lives in a meaningless universe and indifferent world and alienation reflects an awareness of existence. The alienated protagonist finds herself to be impotent and helpless, and isolated from the society. Secondly, search for selfhood stands out among Chopin's literary themes. Chopin describes Edna's how to find selfhood and realization of her true existence through exploring the conflict between selfhood, motherhood and wifehood. And last is Edna's search for freedom. Her freedom is realized by the consequence of independence and self-expression.Chapter Four concentrates on the existentialist ending of Edna. To begin with, Edna's controversial suicide is her responsibility for her choice——a choice of her own will and a kind of spiritual rebirth. In the second place, I venture to approach Edna's ambiguous suicide from Schopenhauer's somewhat melancholy philosophy. Schopenhauer holds that suffering is the essence of life, and suicide is inevitable where the terrors of life outweigh the terrors of death.Chapter Five is a summary of my thesis. Firstly, it restates the main ideas of The Awakening and Chopin's literary achievements. In point of fact, Edna's painful and perplexed epiphanies concerning sense of alienation, selfhood, freedom and the essence of life, etc. ultimately constitute a search of epistemological nature for identity confronting us humans. Her dilemmas carry universal significance for she is actually Everyman. Therefore, my concluding remark is that Edna is one of us human beings, male or female.