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

Langston Hughes and Kate Chopin mathematical function nature in several dimensions to demonstrate the powerful struggles and burdens of gentleman life. Throughout Kate Chopins The Awakening and several of Langston Hughes poems, the sweeping imagery of the hit 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 take freedom from the confines of society, oneself, and finally freedom within 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 token 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 metamo rphosis. 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 thence returns to a life in the city where reside the conflicts that surro und 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 do 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 girl walking through the grass, which was higher than her waist.