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

Wolffs Analysis of Chopins The AwakeningIn her essay Un-Utterable Longing The Discourse of Feminine Sexuality in Kate Chopins 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 do (albeit complex) explanation of Edna Pontelliers behavior and motivations than any single approach could provide. Wolff contends that locating the source of Ednas repression is the key to understanding Chopins story.Wolffs perspective is feminist in that she focuses primarily on the compositors case of Edna. By analyzing The Awakening in a historical context Wolff is also able to effectively explain not only Ednas motivations, but also those of nineteenth-century women in general. According to Wolff, Ednas repression can be traced to the gender crisis that developed within the Presbyterian church during the nineteenth-century. Unli...