The awakening-ali pepin

It's fascinating how books will tend to take time in the way they translate the title to the meaning in a book, however with The Awakening, you could see right away how this is about a woman finding herself. Edna is introduced as this woman with quite some tension between her and her husband. She tends to "neglect" her children, as stated in Chapter 3 and she finds herself more focused on attending to her needs than those of others-which is similar to issues we discussed in class as how the New Woman was looking to better herself. Even the aspect of the New Woman with birth control, can be connected to the way Edna is less of a mother and tends to enjoy hobbies of her own, as if she's taking the time she needs for life as the New Woman would also strive for. When relating this to the New Woman, I found Chapter 10 to be most helpful. Edna's attempt and success at her first time swimming is exhilarating. It's almost as if she was as the book title reads "awakened." This was her ah-ha! wake up moment. From this point, she gains a new sense of self realization and self worth that continually makes her question why she hasn't been living this free since. She has definitely hit the New Woman point where she's refreshed and breaking her boundaries to become different and more self sufficient. One last point I found interesting was how in Chapter 16 she misses Robert, and even her husband realizes it, and she discusses how she tends to 'keep her emotions and thoughts to herself' and I found that interesting in the way it connected to The Yellow Wallpaper. Both women are on the verge of becoming New Women and they have the problem of not being able to express themselves out of fear of other people seeing. Very interesting in the way there's that overlap of ideas in The Awakening, The New Woman and also The Yellow Wallpaper.