Week 6
Discussion Questions for The Awakening, and the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks and
Sylvia Plath. Use textual evidence to support your analyses.
1. Intertextuality: React to each of the below statements from Virginia Woolf’s “A
Room of One’s Own” (1929) as it interrelates to Chopin’s novella. Woolf was
writing a generation later. Is she expressing ideas that have changed since
Chopin’s day? Explain.
a. “[T]o earn money was impossible for them [women of the nineteenth century],
and [. . .] had it been possible, the law denied them the right to possess what
money they earned” (26).
b. “Or is [man’s] anger, I wondered, the familiar, the attendant sprite on power? [. .
.] For if [woman] begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass [man’s
image of himself . . .] How is he to go on giving judgement, civilizing natives,
making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he
can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?” (3132).
c. “[A] highly gifted girl [of the seventeenth century] who had tried to use her gift
for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured
and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her
health and sanity to a certainty” (39).
d. “[I]t is necessary to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door
if you are to write fiction or poetry” (67).
2. Robert chooses not to have sex with Edna. Is he right or wrong? Explain.
3. The novella was controversial through and through at the turn of the twentieth
century, but its ending in particular is what outraged so many readers (especially
Catholic readers). What do you think of the ending? What happens, and is it the
right ending for the novella? Explain.
4. What intersections do you see between The Awakening and any of the poems you
read, “the mother,” “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till,” “The
Disquieting Muses,” “Childless Woman,” and “Edge”?
For next week, select one of these questions to develop further into a one- to twopage essay. Follow MLA style and use plenty of textual evidence, citing as needed.
Also, in addition to turning your mini essay in to me the old-fashioned way, log on to
turnitin.com and post your analysis to the class discussion board. I recommend
writing your analysis in Word; then copying and pasting it inside the discussion board
text box (as opposed to writing directly in the text box).