In life everybody experience an awakening. Where they wake up and realize that it is time to make a change, not for your parents, friends, or lovers but for you. This is the time that you realize the type of person that you have come to be. At times it takes a great deal of hurt, time, or maybe experience to come to the conclusion that all of your life you have been walking in the shoes of a person that society has made up, and the only way that empty feeling is going to go a way is that you wake up and make a change. In the story "The Awakening", by Kate Chopin, Mrs. Edna Pontellier comes in terms with her awakenings in motherhood and being a wife and finally decides to wake up and become independent. .
Edna's awakening begins when she starts to cry when Mr. Pontellier, her husband, says she is not a good mother. He reproached his wife with her inattention, her habitual neglect of the children. "If it was not a mother's place to look after children, whose on earth was it?" (Chopin637). Edna, instead of telling her husband that she had taken care of her children, began to cry like a baby after her husband reprimand her. "She began to cry a little she thrust her face, steaming and wet, into the bend of her arm, and she went on crying there, not caring any longer to dry her face, her eyes, and her arms. She could not have told why she was crying" (Chopin 637). These tears made Edna look as if she was not a good mother and that her husband really didn't trust her with their children. These tears also showed that she did not like where she was, a sign of maturity. Her tears symbolize her first awakening. .
Edna's second awakening began when the man by the name Robert asks Edna if she would like to go for a bath before dinner. During this awakening she stops and realizes her duties to her husband, but she also questions herself. "Edna Pontellier could not have told why, wishing to go to the beach with Robert Lebrun, she should in the first place have declined, and in the second place have followed in obedience to one of the two contradictory impulses which impelled her"(Chopin 642).
