To Spear the Sphere, Martz, Monica
School of Humanities
Professor: Dr. Doni Wilson
Kate Chopin implies that society holds little room for what it is to be a “self-reliant” woman. She makes reference to Emerson, the author of the Romantic work Self-Reliance. She pokes fun at the Romantic ideas that Emerson offers and rather than setting up an ideal of what it is to be self-reliant she shows the limitations of self-reliance through her realist work The Awakening. In the age Chopin lives in, women are not able to obtain this ideal. The woman is not self-reliant, but reliant on the man. The era that Kate Chopin writes in is also the era of the spheres. Woman hold certain roles and men hold certain roles. A woman is to take care of house and home, while a man is to win the bread. Chopin suggests that the only “liberation” a woman can have is that of sexual immorality. The heroine of her story, Edna, reads Emerson “until she grew sleepy.” She is unable to relate to this unachievable goal, and rather than reading a book to find self-reliance she goes out and finds it on her own. She is awakened with a new desire to rely on self and self alone. Ironically, in this search to do away with the sphere of a woman she falls into other stereotypical roles. She becomes emotional and depressed chasing dreams and a man only to be rejected, which inevitably leads to her suicide. Chopin displays the limitations of Emerson’s ideas of what it is to be self-reliant. She also implies that woman strive to be liberated through two venues, either sexual promiscuity or through intellect cultivation.
