![]() ![]() “Youth is given up to illusions,” sighs the doctor. Mandelet underscores nature's centrality as the impediment to Edna's self-realization when he and Edna leave the Ratignolle home together after Adele's ordeal. ![]() Indeed, one might justifiably regard the natural as the privileged category undergirding almost all of those institutions venerated by Edna's and Chopin's contemporaries. W hen Adele Ratignolle gives birth in Chapter 37 of The Awakening, Kate Chopin writes that her heroine, Edna Pontellier, witnesses the suffering of her friend “with an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature.” Of all the verities against which Edna sets herself in shattering her conventional marriage – the religion of domesticity, the family, property, the social order itself – none enjoyed greater prestige in latenineteenth-century American culture than “Nature,” a word Chopin capitalizes as though she were referring to Providence or the Supreme Being. ![]()
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