Use of Nature in Chopins Awakening and Langston Hughes Poems :: comparison compare contrast essays

Langston Hughes and Kate Chopin use nature in several dimensions to demonstrate the strong struggles and burdens of human aliveness. Throughout Kate Chopins The Awakening and several of Langston Hughes poems, the sweeping imagery of the bag and power of nature demonstrates the struggles the characters confront, and their eventual freedom from those struggles. Nature and freedom coexist, and the characters in conclusion learn to find freedom from the confines of association, oneself, and at last freedom indoors ones soul. The use of nature for this purpose brings the characters and speakers in Chopins and Hughes works to life, and the reader feels the life and freedom of those characters. Nature, in the works of Chopin and Hughes serves as a powerful image that represents the struggle of the human soul towards freedom, the anguish of that struggle, and the joy when that freedom is finally reached. In The Awakening, the protagonist Edna Pontellier undergoes a metamorphosis. She lives in Creole society, a society that restricts sexuality, especially for women of the time. Edna is bound by the confines of a loveless marriage, unfulfilled, unhappy, and unlikeable in like a caged bird. During her summer at Grand islet she is confronted with herself in her truest nature, and finds herself swept away by passion and love for mortal she bednot have, Robert Lebrun. The imagery of the oceanic at Grand Isle and its attributes symbolize a force calling her to confront her internal struggles, and find freedom. Chopin uses the imagery of the ocean to represent the innate force within her soul that is calling to her. The parting of the sea is seductive never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a turn of events in abysses of solitude to lose itself in a maze of private contemplation. (p.14) Through nature and its power, Edna, begins to find freedom in her soul and and so returns to a life in the city where reside the co nflicts that surround her. Edna grew up on a Mississippi plantation, where life was simple, happy, and peaceful. The images of nature, which serve as a symbol for freedom of the soul, appear when she speaks of this existence. In the novel, she remembers a simpler life when she was a child, engulfed in nature and free The hot wind beating in my face made me think - without any connection that I can trace - of a summer day in Kentucky, of a meadow that seemed as big as the ocean to the very little daughter walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist.