Meghan Reid

Below is a free term papers summary of the paper "Meghan Reid." If you sign up, you can be reading the rest of this term papers in under two minutes. Registered users should login to view this term paper.

Term Paper Title	Meghan Reid
# of Words	1903
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	7.61

Meghan Reid
Professor Zimmerman
Honors English
December 1, 1998

Nature and the Human Soul: The Shackles of Freedom

Langston Hughes and Kate Chopin use nature in several dimensions to demonstrate the powerful struggles and burdens of human life.  Throughout Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and several of Langston Hughes’ poems, the sweeping imagery of the beauty and power of nature demonstrates the struggles the characters confront, and their eventual freedom from those struggles.  Nature and freedom coexist, and the characters eventually learn to find freedom from the confines of society, oneself, and finally freedom within one’s soul.  The use of nature for this purpose brings the characters and speakers in Chopin’s 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 symbol 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 closed in like a caged bird.  During her summer at Grand Isle she is confronted with herself in her truest nature, and finds herself swept away by passion and love for someone she cannot have, Robert Lebrun.  The imagery of the ocean 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 voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in a maze of inward contemplation.” (p.14)  Through nature and its power, Edna, begins to find freedom in her soul and then returns to a life in the city where reside the conflicts 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...

This is not the end of the termpaper! Register below to see the complete version of this term paper.

Membership Plans	Credit Card	Check

1 month membership

3 month membership (You Save 50%)

6 month membership (You Save 67%)

Copyright © 2002-2007 Mid Term Papers. All rights reserved. This term papers website is used for research purposes only.
If you have forgotten your username or password, please click here.
If you like to cancel your account, please click here.

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 19 - 20 - 21 - 22