Wolff’s Analysis of Chopin’s The Awakening Essay -- Chopin Awakening

Wolff’s Analysis of Chopin’s The Awakening In her essay "Un-Utterable Longing: The Discourse of Feminine Sexuality in Kate Chopin's The Awakening", Cynthia Griffin Wolff creates what Ross Murfin describes as "a critical whole that is greater than the sum of its parts." (376) By employing a variety of critical approaches (including feminist, gender, cultural, new historicism, psychoanalytic and deconstruction) Wolff offers the reader a more complete (albeit complex) explanation of Edna Pontellier's behavior and motivations than any single approach could provide. Wolff contends that locating the source of Edna's repression is the key to understanding Chopin's story. Wolff's perspective is feminist in that she focuses primarily on the character of Edna. By analyzing The Awakening in a historical context Wolff is also able to effectively explain not only Edna's motivations, but also those of nineteenth-century women in general. According to Wolff, Edna's repression can be traced to the gender crisis that developed within the Presbyterian church during the nineteenth-century. Unli...