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Can I read Chopin’s Bildungsroman: Male Role Models in The Awakening on EtoBox?
Chopin’s Bildungsroman: Male Role Models in The Awakening by Mainland, Catherine is a Arts and Humanities article available to read on EtoBox.
What is Chopin’s Bildungsroman: Male Role Models in The Awakening about?
Male Role Models in The Awakening ASSERTIONS THAT THE AWAKENING IS AN EXAMINATION OF REGRESSION ARE commonplace in scholarship about the novel. Cynthia Griffin Wolff describes Edna Pontellier's suicide as "a stripping away of adulthood" (257), while others explain the role of Adèle Ratignolle or of the sea in terms of Edna's quest to return to the womb. Edna is certainly a "modern alienated individual" (Papke 4), but in focusing myopically on her, critics have neglected Chopin's skillful use of other characters to explore Edna's situation. Five male characters-Edna's two sons, Victor, Arobin, and Dr. Mandelet-represent the four stages of childhood, adolescence, young manhood, and maturity. The influence these characters have on Edna follows a chronological progression through the natural stages of development of man, as might be encountered in a traditional, masculine narrative. Read against this background, Edna's awakening becomes a progressive, rather than a regressive, tale. Despite society's tacit demand that she play along with the others, Edna spends the last months of her life maturing beyond her socially-sanctioned state of arrested development. Rather than presenting the
Who reads Chopin’s Bildungsroman: Male Role Models in The Awakening?
It is typically read by researchers, students, and practitioners in Arts and Humanities.
- Author
- Mainland, Catherine
- Publisher
- Project MUSE
- Published
- 2011
- Language
- EN
- Field
- Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)