Symbolic Meaning of Edna’s Arms and Teeth in Chopin’s The Awakening :: Chopin Awakening

emblematical Meaning of Ednas Arms and Teeth in Chopins The modifyAlthough characters personalities are described vividly in The Awakening through action, dialogue, and renderings of clothing, tiny is presented of the characters physic every last(predicate)y. While Edna is al one in Madame Antoines house, recumbing, two moments occur in which specific aspects of her body are highlighted. Prior to this scene, it is subsistn only that she is considered bonny and that her hair and eyes are a similar yellow-brown color. At Madame Antoines house, however, where Edna loses sense of time while resting, first her munition and past her teeth demonstrate her peculiar strengths.It is problematic to consider Edna as strong so soon after having nearly swooned in the small island church. Although we know that she had slept lowly the night before and that her invitation to Robert was her first conscious move into a new sort of consciousness, her apparent moment of epiphany is accompanied by an all too typical display of feminine weakness. Moments later, lying in Madame Antoines bed, Edna is revealed as contradictorily strong. While stretching her strong limbs that ached a little Edna pauses and notices her arms. She looked at her round arms as she held them straight up and rubbed them one after the new(prenominal), observing closely, as if it were something she saw for the first time, the fine, firm select and texture of her flesh (58). In this description, her arms appear detached from the rest of her body. She discovers that she has strengthnot of spirit or mind, which is what the rest of the narrative focuses on, just of body. After she awakens, her attention is drawn away from her self personally, but the description of her returns to this physical strength when she finds the snack Madame Antoine had left for her. Edna bit a find fault from the brown loaf, watering it with her strong, white teeth (59). Because there is no other description in the paragraph, her teeth here stand out as odd. The action of biting the loaf sooner than cutting or tearing it with her hands exhibits her characteristic carelessness, but also a bit of sin that is surprising. The teeth represent her latent strength here, in action rather than in rest, as she had seen her arms. It is unclear to me what significance, if any, there might be to these images of her arms and her teeth.