The Awakening & Presentation Idea

Kate Chopin’s The Awakening was a very controversial book back during the time in which it was written. It is easy to see this because it shows the main female character, Edna, wanting to explore her sexual desires with other men besides her husband. She goes off on many excursions with various men throughout the story – while deceiving those around her, mainly her husband. In the process she starts to realize that she doesn’t want to be a “proper lady” like madame Ratignolle, but instead was wanting to be more like mademoiselle Reisz who was more artistic and free-spirited. We didn’t really understand why Edna would choose to swim out into the ocean and drown herself though. In class we talked about the Creole vs. Anglo argument that is portrayed in this book, and because Edna was of Creole decent we have now come to the conclusion that she most likely drowned herself because she was “owned” by her husband. We say this because in class we talked about some of the Creole customs and one of them was that the women are pretty much the property of the men. So with that being said, Edna would have been afraid to confront her husband because she had cheated on him and was afraid of just what he would do.

Now we would like to go over what we plan to do for our final paper/presentation. The three of us (plus Joshua Zaborowski) plan on creating a website on the topic of 19^th century heroism. We chose this topic because although it is broad, it gives us a lot of room to work with and will be able to compare and contrast the different styles of heroes that we have learned about during this semester. We will be focusing mainly on Byronic and Romantic heroes, while also comparing the modern day hero to the 19^th century hero. We have the general basis of what our presentation/paper will be on. The main heroes (or stories) that we plan to focus on are Joaquin Murrieta, Frankenstein, and the slave in Douglass’s Narrative to name a few. We will discuss how each of these characters are heroes and what purpose they serve in their respective stories, as well as the similarities and differences amongst them. We will be getting together over the next few weeks to iron out the rest of the details and put the information in a neat, organized, and creative outlook on our websites – while also putting the process of the website design into our paper and presentation. Please provide us with some helpful output on if our idea is ideal and possibly what you might suggest we do differently, thank you!